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Lemon-juice (Two tablespoonfuls)
Two tablespoonfuls of Espagnole Sauce.
Take a nice fresh lobster, split it down the centre and cut the meat into small pieces; fry it in salad oil for five minutes, then pour off the oil and add the sherry, salt, pepper, cayenne, chopped parsley and garlic and chablis, let this all boil for about five minutes, then add the Espagnole sauce, boil it for a few minutes more, dish up the meat in the shells, add the butter and lemon-juice to the sauce, give it a boil up, pour it over the lobster, and serve.
This is essentially lobster à l'américaine under a British name, and it comes to us mangled: the page is headed with one line of what was clearly a longer ingredient list, so the sherry, chablis, garlic, parsley and butter are all called for in the method without any stated amounts. The proportions below are the ones that matter.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice and two of Espagnole survive from the original list. For one lobster, a glass of chablis (about 150 ml), a tablespoon of sherry, one clove of garlic, a tablespoon of chopped parsley and about 25 g of butter are in keeping with the style. Treat these as reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- Do not overcook the meatThis is the hinge. The lobster is fried five minutes, boiled five in the wine, then boiled again with the sauce and once more after the butter goes in — close to fifteen minutes of heat, which turns lobster to rubber. Fry the pieces two minutes to set them, lift them out, build the sauce, and return the meat only to warm through at the end.
- Splitting the lobsterThe recipe does not say whether the lobster is raw or cooked, but frying the meat for five minutes points to a raw one, split down the centre, shell and all; the shells then serve as dishes ('dish up the meat in the shells'). Kill it first by driving a heavy knife point down through the head behind the eyes, then split lengthwise. Reserve any coral and the green tomalley; they thicken and colour the sauce.
- Salad oil'Salad oil' in nineteenth-century British books usually means olive oil, though other bland oils were sold under the name. Any neutral oil with a decent smoke point works here, since the point is to seize the flesh rather than to flavour it.
- Espagnole sauceA brown mother sauce of veal or beef stock, browned mirepoix and a brown roux, cooked down for hours. Two tablespoons is a glaze, not a sauce base — the wine does most of the work. A couple of spoonfuls of reduced brown stock, or good demi-glace, stands in without disgracing the dish.
- Butter and lemon at the endThe instruction to "give it a boil up" after the butter goes in is against modern practice; a butter-mounted sauce splits at a hard boil. Take the pan off direct heat, swirl the butter in a piece at a time, then add the lemon juice.
- Two tablespoons of lemon juiceThat is a lot of acid for one lobster's worth of sauce, on top of a glass of white wine. Add half, taste, and add the rest only if the sauce needs lifting.
- YieldOne lobster of about 700 g to 1 kg, served in its two half-shells, feeds two as a first course or one as a main.
Lobster cooked in oil with white wine, garlic, tomato and cayenne emerged in Parisian restaurants in the second half of the nineteenth century, generally traced to the à l'américaine or à l'armoricaine dishes whose true origin has been argued over ever since — Brittany or a chef's American clientele, depending on who is telling it. British "high class" cookery of the period absorbed such dishes and anchored them to the classical sauce repertoire: hence the spoonfuls of Espagnole, though brown sauce or meat glaze also turns up in French versions of the dish. The garrulous single-paragraph method, with its ingredients named but not measured, gives the order of operations and leaves the proportions to the cook.