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Cayenne and Salt (Pound the coral or spawn)
Pound the coral or spawn in a mortar with half an ounce of butter and pass it through a hairsieve. Melt the rest of the butter and stir in the flour, add the fish stock and stir until it boils.
Then add the coral or spawn butter, the lemonjuice, cream, cayenne, and salt, to taste; whisk well and serve.
L2
This is the second half of a classic lobster coral sauce, printed without its ingredient list — the quantities of butter, flour, stock, cream and lemon juice were given in the book's standard proportions and have to be reconstructed. Work from a basic velouté and the method reads perfectly clearly.
- Missing quantitiesThe original gives no amounts beyond the half ounce of butter creamed with the coral. A workable base is 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, half a pint (roughly 1 cup) of fish stock and 2 tablespoons of cream, with lemon juice, cayenne and salt to taste. Any conversion here is inference, not what the book actually says.
- Coral and spawnCoral is the roe of a hen lobster, dark green when raw and turning bright scarlet on cooking; "spawn" is used for the same thing in older writing. The lobster has usually been boiled first, so the coral is already cooked; coral pounded raw will not take its scarlet colour unless it is heated.
- Coral butterPounding the coral with butter and sieving it is what gives the sauce its colour and its silky body. A mini food processor does the pounding; the sieving is not optional, as unstrained roe leaves grit.
- Hair sieveA fine drum sieve of woven horsehair. A fine-mesh conical strainer with the paste pushed through by a rubber spatula does the same job.
- The hingeThe coral butter goes in after the sauce has boiled and thickened. The recipe gives no further heating, and reboiling an enriched, coloured sauce risks dulling the scarlet and splitting it.
- Fish stockUse a light fish fumet, simmered with the lobster shells if you have them. Bottled clam juice is salty, so hold back on the salt until the end.
- CayenneCayenne with lobster is a seasoning, not a heat source — an eighth of a teaspoon in this quantity is plenty. It sharpens the sweetness of the roe rather than announcing itself.
- Yield and servingOn the reconstructed quantities above, about a cup, enough for four portions. It is a sauce for poached turbot, brill, salmon or boiled fowl, and for filling vol-au-vents.
Lobster sauce coloured and thickened with the hen's coral was a fixture of English and Anglo-French cookery from the late eighteenth century onward, and it survives in the classical repertoire as beurre de homard and sauce cardinal. Pounding a flavouring into butter and passing it through a sieve was a familiar way of extracting colour and flavour — the same treatment was given to shrimp, anchovy and green herbs. The entry begins mid-thought because the ingredients and their proportions evidently stood above or elsewhere in the volume; the label "Cayenne and Salt" looks like an artefact of indexing rather than a title the book gave the sauce.