Lobster Sauce
One pound of lobster, three tablespoonfuls of cream, one of butter, salt, cayenne pepper. Beat the coral of the lobster with the cream and butter.
A pink, buttery lobster sauce — the traditional dressing for boiled fish — colored and flavored by the lobster’s own coral.
- “Coral” = lobster roeThe roe of a female lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked; beaten with cream and butter it both colors and flavors the sauce.
- Not every lobster has itOnly females carry coral; if yours has none, a little tomato paste or paprika gives the rosy tint.
- It’s a sauce for fishThis is meant to nap poached or boiled fish — salmon, cod, turbot — not to be eaten on its own.
- Keep it gentleWarm the cream and butter through with the flaked meat; don’t boil, or the cream may split.
- Cayenne for liftA pinch of cayenne wakes up all that richness.
Lobster sauce was a fixture of 18th- and 19th-century English and American cooking, ladled over boiled fish at grand dinners. Its secret was the coral — the roe of the hen (female) lobster — which cooks to a brilliant red and was prized for tinting sauces and butters a deep rose. Cookbooks of the era fussed over saving and sieving coral for exactly this purpose, since it gave the sauce both its blush and its unmistakable taste of the sea. A pinch of cayenne was the customary final flourish.
From page 35 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
