Home › Fish › Lemon Juice Paprika
Lemon Juice Paprika
Clean and parboil oysters; drain, and add to liquor body bones and tough claw meat from lobster, water, celery, and onion. Cook slowly until stock is reduced to one cup, and strain. Make sauce of butter, flour, strained stock, and cream. Add oysters and lobster meat cut in strips; then add seasonings. One-half teaspoon beef extract is an improvement to this dish.
A lobster and oyster stew in cream sauce, built on a quick shellfish stock made from the parts most cooks discard. The original assumes you know standard cream-sauce proportions and gives no quantities, so a few benchmarks help.
- Oysters: keep the cooking brief"Parboil" here means only until the edges ruffle, roughly a minute in their own liquor. They then go back into the finished sauce at the very end, off the heat if possible; a second stretch of simmering turns them tough and shrunken.
- "Liquor" is the oyster liquidIt means the briny juice drained from the shucked oysters, not spirits. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth, since it usually carries grit and shell fragments, and reserve every spoonful for the stock.
- Body bones and tough claw meatThe "bones" are the cartilaginous shell of the lobster body along with the legs and head shell. These, with the tough claw meat, are simmered with celery and onion for the stock; the recipe puts back only "lobster meat cut in strips", i.e. the tender meat.
- Reduce to one cupThis fixes the scale of the dish. Simmer the shells, water and aromatics gently, uncovered, until a cup of strained liquid remains; hard boiling clouds shellfish stock and dulls it.
- Sauce proportionsA cup of stock plus about a cup of cream calls for roughly 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour for a stew consistency, or 4 of each if you want it thick enough to coat. Cook the roux a minute before adding liquid so it does not taste raw.
- Beef extractThe optional half teaspoon means a concentrated meat paste of the Bovril or Liebig type. A modern beef bouillon concentrate does the same job; it is there for savoury depth, and it is salty, so season afterwards.
- SeasoningsFor a dish of this period that means salt, white or cayenne pepper, a little paprika and a squeeze of lemon added at the end. Acid goes in last and off the heat, since lemon juice can curdle a cream sauce held over a flame.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities of oysters or lobster, so servings depend on what you use; a sauce built on one cup of stock makes a small dish, served with toast or in patty shells.