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Lobster
1 small lobster 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/8 teaspoon cayenne 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 pt. boiling water Cut the meat into dice, pound the coral with 1 tablespoon of butter; cook together the flour mixed with seasonings and the remainder of the butter, add the water slowly and the pounded coral, and simmer five minutes. Strain over the lobster meat, boil up once and serve.
A plain creamed lobster in a cayenne-spiked butter sauce, from a flour company's promotional book — which is why the roux gets top billing. Two things decide whether it works: the lobster is already cooked, and the sauce is thin by design.
- The lobster is cooked before you startThe recipe assumes a boiled lobster picked from the shell, since it tells you to dice the meat and pound the coral. A small hard-shell lobster of about 1 to 1 1/4 lb yields roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of meat.
- "Boil up once and serve" is the hingeThe cooked meat goes into the strained sauce only long enough to heat through — one rolling boil, well under a minute. Held at a simmer, lobster tightens and turns fibrous and watery.
- CoralThe dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked; it is worked with butter here as both thickener and colouring. Male lobsters have none, and lobsters bought at retail often arrive without it. Without coral the sauce is simply paler -- add a teaspoon of tomato paste for colour if you want it, or leave it.
- Proportions and consistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to a pint (2 cups) of water gives a deliberately loose sauce, closer to a gravy than a cream sauce. For something that coats the meat, use 1 to 1 1/2 cups of liquid, or double the flour.
- Water, not milk or stockBoiling water is what the original calls for. The lobster shells, simmered 20 minutes and strained, make a far better liquid and cost nothing extra.
- SaltNone is listed, an omission common in books of this period where salt was taken for granted. Season the sauce before it goes over the meat, and remember 1/8 teaspoon cayenne in this quantity is noticeable heat.
- Lemon juiceThe method never says where it goes. Add it off the heat at the end, after the final boil, so it stays bright.
- Yield and servingServes two as a light main or four on toast points, in patty shells, or over rice. It reheats badly.
The Gold Medal Flour cook books were published by Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills, and their purpose was to put the brand name inside the recipe line — hence "2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour" in a dish where the flour is the least interesting ingredient. The dish itself belongs to the long American run of creamed shellfish, cousin to lobster Newburg and lobster à la king, which flourished when Northeast lobster was cheap, plentiful and often sold already boiled. Pounding the coral with butter to enrich and tint a sauce is an older technique borrowed from French practice, where the same paste is called beurre de homard; it has largely disappeared from home cooking, a decline often attributed to the fact that modern retail lobster rarely arrives with the roe intact.