Lobster
Government commissioners report that lobsters are getting fewer and smaller every year, and we all know that they are getting dearer. The chief reason of this is our own folly-a stupid admiration of coral. The coral and spawn of the lobster, though nothing to taste, is most excellent in colour, and for the sake of it millions upon millions of eggs are annually destroyed. And yet a Lobster colour quite as good may be obtained by pounding the shell in a mortar, mixing it with butter, cooking it in the bain-marie for an hour, and then passing it through a tammy; or if this red be not bright enough, it can easily be made perfect with cochineal.
Lobster Butter is roughly described in the last sentence. Add here that the coral and spawn are commonly used either with or without the pounded shell. If the former alone are used, pound them well, mix them with twice their weight of butter, season them with salt and pepper, and pass them through a silk sieve-but do not in any way cook them. If the lobster shells are used, take equal weights of shell and butter, pound them together, and cook them for an hour; but mark that for the sake of the colour the cooking is to be done in the bain-mariethat is, at a temperature much below the boiling point of water. When the butter thus coloured has been properly cooled in water, seasoned with cayenne pepper and salt, and passed through silk, it may be mixed with an equal quantity of fresh butter. The reason of dividing the butter into two quantities in this way is that the process of cooking destroys the natural flavour of the fresh butter. Therefore only half is used to cook the lobster shells, and the other half is added uncooked when the first half is got clear of shell.
Lobster Sauce. Split a lobster, and use the coral, the spawn, the shell, and the pith of the body to make lobster butter as above described. Then make English sauce --but only Act First (that is, the vehicle); and into this vehicle, quite hot, put the tail and the claws, cut into small dice. For the Second Act, the completion of the sauce, add the lobster butter, and finish with a squeeze of lemon. Most English receipts put in a word for a little essence of anchovies. Let the anchovies be kept in their own place, and not suffered to interfere with the delicate flavour of the lobster.
Lope de Vega Lobster Salad and Mayonnaise of Lobster. - A cookery book without a paragraph on the lobster salad would be considered sadly wanting. But this is sheer stupidity. A lobster salad is nothing but the pickings of a lobster surrounded with a salad. A Mayonnaise of lobster is precisely the same thing with a Mayonnaise sauce instead of the ordinary cruet sauce used in mixing the salad. If there is anything more to be said, it has only to do with the ornamental arrangement of the dish-which, as so much depends on the juxtaposition of colour, it is impossible to teach in a book.
Two workable preparations are buried in this essay: lobster butter (in three versions) and lobster sauce built on it. The rest is Dallas grumbling about coral and salad.
- Bain-marie means low, not simmeringThe original specifies only 'a temperature much below the boiling point of water'. Keep the butter well under a simmer in a bowl over barely steaming water; the point of the long slow cooking is to draw the colour out without the butter catching or browning.
- Tammy and silk sieveA tammy is a worsted straining cloth; the silk sieve is a very fine drum sieve. Damp muslin or a double layer of cheesecloth in a fine strainer does both jobs, and shell fragments must be caught completely.
- Pounding the shellsA food processor will not break lobster shell down usefully; it only chips it. A heavy mortar, or a sturdy bag and a mallet, is still the method. Body shell and legs pound more easily than the claws.
- "Cooled in water"'Cooled in water' -- the original cools the butter in water and passes it through silk afterwards. Pouring the hot butter into cold water lets it set so the solid disc can be lifted off and blotted dry, leaving grit and milk solids behind in the water.
- The raw coral versionCoral and spawn come only from a hen lobster and are dark green until heated. The recipe pounds them with twice their weight of butter, seasons, sieves and expressly forbids cooking; it does not say how the uncooked butter is then to be used.
- English sauce, Act FirstKettner's 'vehicle' is the plain base of his English sauce, a thickened butter sauce let down with liquid; 'Act Second' is the enrichment, here the lobster butter, which is best added off the heat or just below a simmer so it does not split.
- CochinealStill sold as carmine or natural red 4, and still made from scale insects, so it is not vegetarian. A very small quantity is enough; the shell butter usually needs no help.
- The diceTail and claw meat go into hot sauce already cooked; they need only to warm through. A minute or two is enough before the butter and lemon go in.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner, whose Soho restaurant it advertised by association. The complaint that opens this entry was topical: British fishery commissioners in the 1860s and 1870s reported falling lobster landings and shrinking average size, and the taking of berried hens for their roe was among the practices said to be of concern - the coral being prized purely as a colourant, since, as Dallas says, it is nothing much to taste. His shell-and-butter substitute is not a novelty of his own but standard French kitchen practice for beurre de homard, later codified by Escoffier, and the trick of splitting the butter so that only half is cooked is a piece of genuine professional reasoning. The stray line "Lope de Vega" is the head of the next alphabetical entry, caught up in the text.