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Lobster Soup, with Milk
Prepare the meat of the lobster as in the last recipe. Cut it very small, and mix with it the crumb of a French roll, finely grated. Put a pint and a half of milk and half a pint of water in a stewpan, season it with a dessert-spoonful of salt and a salt-spoonful of pepper; put into it, when boiling, the lobster, the French roll, and three ounces of fresh butter. Simmer gently for half an hour, and serve. If liked, preserved lobster can be used for making lobster soup.
A plain milk-based lobster soup, thickened with grated bread rather than flour or cream. The one thing to watch is the half-hour simmer, which is aimed at the bread, not the shellfish.
- The missing first step"As in the last recipe" refers back to a preceding lobster recipe not reproduced here; the usual preparation is to boil the lobster, split it, and pick the meat from tail, claws and body, discarding the stomach sac and the dark intestinal vein. The coral and green tomalley can go in too if you want colour and depth. A 1 1/2 to 2 lb lobster yields somewhere around 6 to 8 oz of picked meat, which is about the right scale here.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint and a half of milk plus half a pint of water is, in Imperial measure, about 850 ml milk and 285 ml water — near enough 3 1/2 cups and 1 1/4 cups US. Three ounces of butter is about 85 g. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons; a saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon.
- Season at the end, not the startTwo teaspoons of salt in just over a litre of liquid is close to one percent before the lobster, which is already salty from boiling, goes in. Add half and taste after the soup has reduced.
- The French rollA soft white bread roll with a thin crust; the crumb is the interior, grated on the coarse side of a box grater to give about a cup of loose crumbs. It is the only thickener in the dish and needs the full simmer to dissolve into the milk. Panko and dried breadcrumbs will not break down the same way.
- Don't boil the milkA stewpan of milk with butter and bread in it will catch and scorch over direct heat. Use a heavy pan, keep it at a bare tremble, and stir the bottom every few minutes. If it does catch, decant off the top rather than stirring the burnt layer through.
- When to add the lobsterThe recipe puts the meat in at the start, which after thirty minutes gives firm, faintly stringy lobster. The meat is already cooked; hold most of it back and add it for the last five minutes, letting only the shell trimmings or coral go in early for flavour.
- Preserved lobsterBy this date that would most often have meant tinned lobster, then arriving in quantity from Canada and New England, though potted lobster sealed under butter was also sold under the same description. Modern canned or frozen lobster works, though it is softer and saltier — cut the added salt further and add it at the very end.
- YieldSomething over a litre of soup once the lobster and crumb are in, less after the half-hour simmer; four first-course servings. It is thin by modern standards; a little cream stirred in off the heat is in keeping with the period.
Cassell's places this among a run of lobster dishes that assume a cook who has just boiled a lobster and wants to use every part of it, and the milk-and-bread base marks it as the domestic version rather than the restaurant one. Where a French bisque leans on shells pounded with rice and stock, the British household soup of the 1870s thickened with grated crumb from a "French roll" — a soft white morning roll, not a baguette — a technique inherited from much older bread-thickened pottages and still common in Victorian white soups and sauces. The casual offer of "preserved lobster" at the end is worth noticing: canning had by then made lobster an inland ingredient, shipped in tins from the Atlantic fisheries of Canada and Maine, and a dish that a generation earlier belonged to coastal towns and London fishmongers could be attempted anywhere the railway reached.