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One Lobster (Two ounces of Butter)
Two ounces of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Half a pint of Water.
One tablespoonful of Cream.
Half a teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
This entry is an ingredient list in the style of a cookery-school notebook: the quantities are given, the method is assumed. What is described is a plain white sauce enriched with the meat of one lobster, served with boiled fish.
- The measures are imperialThe measures are presumably imperial -- if the book is British, Half a pint is 10 fl oz, roughly 1¼ US cups. Two ounces of butter is half a stick; one ounce of flour is a scant ¼ cup.
- The roux is deliberately richTwo parts butter to one part flour is twice the fat of a standard white roux, which is what keeps the sauce glossy rather than pasty. Cook the flour in the butter for two or three minutes before the liquid goes in, without letting it colour.
- Use the shells for the waterThe half pint of water is doing very little on its own. Simmer the broken shells and small legs in it for twenty minutes and strain: that is the difference between lobster sauce and buttered flour, though the entry as printed specifies only water.
- The lobster goes in lastCut the tail and claw meat into neat dice and fold it into the finished sauce off the heat, just long enough to warm through. Boiled again it turns fibrous and squeaky.
- Coral and creamIf the lobster is a hen, the dark coral turns scarlet on cooking; pounded with a little of the butter and passed through a sieve it colours the sauce pink. The single tablespoon of cream is for finish, not body, and should go in with the lemon juice at the end.
- Nothing is said about seasoningNo salt, pepper or cayenne is listed, which reflects a shorthand entry rather than a bland sauce. Season the sauce before the lemon juice and taste again after, since acid sharpens the perception of salt.
- YieldThe liquid base is about 1¼ cups; with the lobster meat folded in it makes rather more, enough for several portions of poached turbot, salmon, cod or halibut.
Lobster sauce belonged to a fixed Victorian and Edwardian pairing: boiled turbot or salmon sent to table with a tureen of it, the fish plain and the sauce carrying the richness. Books titled high class cookery were generally written out of the cookery schools and training kitchens that spread through Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, teaching a French-derived repertoire to middle-class households and to servants being trained for them. The clipped format here tis a list of weights with no method attached ti suggests that a white sauce made with butter, flour and liquid in these ratios was assumed knowledge. Lobster was expensive but not exotic in coastal Britain.