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Lobster with Cream Sauce
I lobster (3 pounds, live weight) 1 tablespoonful of butter 1 tablespoonful of flour 5 mushrooms 1 tablespoonful of butter ½ pint of milk Salt and pepper to taste Boil and open the lobster as directed. Cut it into dice. Put the butter in a frying pan, and, when melted, add the flour; do not brown, but mix until smooth; add the milk, stir constantly until it boils; add the mushrooms chopped fine, salt, pepper and the lobster; stir until thoroughly heated. Serve in paper cases. 1
A plain white sauce built in the pan, with lobster folded in at the end. The whole thing depends on not cooking the lobster twice.
- The hinge: reheat, do not cookThe lobster is already cooked. Fold the dice into the finished sauce off the heat or over the barest flame, just until warmed through — a minute or two. Held at a simmer it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- MeasurementsHalf a pint of milk is one cup. The butter is listed twice, a tablespoon each time, but the method only accounts for one of them, in the roux; the second is left unexplained — use it to cook the mushrooms, or stir it into the sauce at the end for gloss.
- How much lobster you actually getA 3 lb live lobster yields roughly 10 to 12 oz of picked meat, tail, claws and knuckles together. That is enough for four small servings or two generous ones.
- "Boil and open as directed"The book's earlier instruction, not part of this page. A lobster of this size needs closer to 20 minutes in heavily salted boiling water, then cooling before picking.
- The mushroomsFive mushrooms stirred in raw will weep water into the sauce and taste flat. Chop and sauté them in the second tablespoon of butter until the moisture has gone and they begin to colour, then add them.
- Sauce consistencyOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives a thin coating sauce. If it seems loose once the mushrooms and lobster go in, let it reduce a moment before the lobster is added, not after.
- SeasoningSalt, white pepper, and a pinch of cayenne or a scrape of nutmeg if you like; both turn up often with lobster in books of this period. A teaspoon of dry sherry is not in the original but is entirely in keeping.
- Paper casesUsed for hot entrées. Ramekins, small scallop shells, or baked pastry shells all serve; if you use paper cases, set them on a tray so they do not slump.
The dish is a lobster à la crème: cooked shellfish bound in a white sauce, a formula the period applied interchangeably to lobster, crab, oysters and chicken, and served in individual paper cases so that a small quantity of expensive meat could be presented as a course in its own right. Serving it that way, rather than heaped in a dish, suggests a light entrée rather than a main course. Five mushrooms is an accent quantity rather than a bulk ingredient.