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Lobster-Coral Sauce
Thicken 1/2 pint of strong white stock with 1 tablespoonful of flour rubbed with 1 tablespoonful of butter, and add 1/2 cupful of thick cream and the coral of the lobster pounded with 1 tablespoonful of butter. Simmer ten minutes and add 1 tablespoonful of sherry and a squeeze of lemon juice, and strain through a fine sieve.
A classic hot butter-and-cream sauce for boiled or baked lobster, built on a white roux and coloured by the lobster's own roe. The coral is the whole point: it supplies the colour and most of the flavour.
- Coral, and where to get itCoral is the unfertilised roe of a hen lobster, black-green when raw and bright scarlet once cooked. Only female lobsters have it, and it is generally lost when you buy tails or picked meat, so you need to boil a whole hen lobster yourself and reserve it. If none is available, the sauce becomes a plain cream sauce with sherry.
- Half a pint of stockEight fluid ounces if read as a US pint, ten if imperial; the recipe does not say which, and its use of "cupful" gives no firm answer. Either works; the sauce simply comes out thicker at the smaller volume. "Strong white stock" means a well-reduced veal or chicken stock.
- Cook the flour firstRub the flour and butter together, then let the roux cook in the stock for a few minutes before the cream goes in. Ten minutes of simmering afterwards is enough to lose any raw-flour taste.
- Coral butterPound the coral with the second tablespoonful of butter until it is a smooth paste, or push it through a sieve first. Lumps of unbroken roe will not disperse and will be caught by the final straining, taking their colour with them.
- Keep it below a boilOnce the cream and coral butter are in, hold the pan at a bare simmer. A rolling boil will curdle the cream and dull the scarlet colour to a muddy brick.
- Sherry at the endA dry or medium sherry, added off the heat or in the last moment, so the aroma survives. The lemon is there to cut the butterfat, not to be tasted as lemon.
- SeasoningThe original gives no seasoning at all, presumably leaving it to the stock. Taste before straining and add salt and white pepper; a pinch of cayenne is a common addition with lobster.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a half. Serve hot over lobster, poached white fish or vol-au-vent cases; it thickens as it cools and will need thinning with a little stock if reheated.