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Lobster with Cecil Sauce
Boil a three-pound lobster and open as directed. Cut the meat into pieces about one inch square. Put a tablespoonful of butter into a frying pan, and, when melted, add one tablespoonful of flour; mix until smooth, add one gill of cream, one gill of stock, and stir constantly until it boils; add the lobster, salt and pepper to taste. Heat thoroughly, take from the fire, add the beaten yolk of one egg and a tablespoonful of chopped parsley. This may be served in paper cases or individual dishes.
A simple cream velouté finished with egg yolk, from an era when the point of a summer dish was that it cooked quickly and was served in small portions. Everything hinges on the last thirty seconds.
- The hinge: the yolk goes in off the heatOnce the beaten yolk is stirred in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into scrambled threads. Take the pan fully off the burner, and if the sauce looks too hot, let it stand a minute before adding the yolk.
- A gill is half a cupSo the sauce is 1/2 cup cream and 1/2 cup stock to 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour — a thin, pourable sauce, not a thick binding one. Fish stock is the natural choice; a light chicken or veal stock also works.
- "Boil a three-pound lobster"A 3-lb lobster yields roughly three-quarters of a pound of picked meat. Fifteen to eighteen minutes in hard-boiling salted water is enough for that size; longer toughens the tail. Two 1 1/2-lb lobsters give a similar total yield and cook in about 10-12 minutes.
- Don't cook the lobster twiceThe meat is already fully cooked. It goes into the finished sauce only to warm through — a minute or two. Simmering it in the sauce turns it stringy and rubbery.
- Save the coral and tomalleyThe book assumes you have opened the lobster yourself. The green tomalley and any red coral, mashed and stirred into the sauce with the cream, add colour and depth, though this recipe does not call for them.
- Paper casesThese are small pleated cases of stiff paper, buttered and dried in the oven so they hold their shape. Ramekins, scallop shells or small gratin dishes do the same job.
- YieldServes four as a first course, or two or three as a light lunch dish with bread or toast.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late-nineteenth-century American cookbooks aimed squarely at the problem of feeding a household in July from a coal range in an unventilated kitchen: the recipes are short, the cooking times brief, and the portions small and often served cold or in individual cases. Lobster in a cream sauce enriched with egg yolk is a straightforward velouté in the French manner, whose spread through American middle-class cookery is often traced to the cooking schools of the 1870s and 1880s; the same base appears in period books as lobster à la Newburg, à la crème and in countless "à la" variants named after a person, a hotel or a patron. The name "Cecil" here is of that type — a personal or house name attached to a sauce — and its origin has not been identified; it is best read as one of the many now-unidentifiable eponyms that filled the sauce chapters of the period. The instruction to serve in paper cases is a mark of the same fashion: individual portions looked genteel, cooled faster, and stretched an expensive shellfish across more guests.