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Lobster Butter
Seasoning. Prawns. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, add the stock and cream, boil up, add lobster butter, seasoning, and chopped prawns.
What survives here is the method half of a page whose ingredient list has been lost in the printing — the quantities of butter, flour, stock and cream are missing, and "Seasoning. Prawns." is the tail end of that list. It is a standard rich white sauce finished with lobster butter, and can be reconstructed by anyone who knows the base proportions.
- The missing proportionsA sauce of this type in period cookery runs to equal weights of butter and flour — around 1 oz each — to roughly half a pint of stock with two or three tablespoons of cream. The original page does not state them, so treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the author's.
- Lobster butter is the pointIt is made chiefly from the shells, coral and spawn pounded with butter (commonly about an equal weight, though authorities differ), warmed gently, then pressed through a fine sieve or muslin. The colour and scent come mainly from the shell and coral rather than the flesh; skipping it leaves you with a plain prawn cream sauce.
- Add it off the heatAdd it late -- The base is boiled up before the lobster butter goes in. Boiling a compound butter after it is added tends to split it and dull the red, so it is best stirred in with the pan off the flame, though the recipe itself does not say so.
- StockThe recipe does not specify. Fish stock or the liquor from the lobster and prawn shells suits it, though a light white meat stock was also used for sauces of this kind; a shellfish stock reduced from the trimmings is the modern equivalent.
- PrawnsCooked, peeled and chopped, added at the very end only to warm through. A minute or two is enough — held in a hot sauce they toughen quickly.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves this open. Salt with cayenne, and sometimes a little lemon juice or anchovy, was usual with shellfish; cayenne in particular lifts it, so use it sparingly and taste.
Lobster butter belongs to the classical French repertoire that English professional cookery absorbed in the later nineteenth century, and it survives in Escoffier-era kitchens as one of a family of compound shellfish butters — crayfish, shrimp, lobster — made by pounding shell and coral with butter to extract colour and flavour from parts that would otherwise be thrown away. The small hot mouthful served after the sweet was a course that flourished from roughly the 1870s to the Second World War and then largely vanished. This entry survives only as its method: whatever ingredient list stood above it is not present in the text as given.