Home › Sauces for Meat and Vegetables › Lobster Hollandaise
Lobster Hollandaise
To Hollandaise Sauce, add few gratings of nutmeg, one cup chopped lobster meat, and the dried and pounded coral. 1 cup Brown Sauce
This is a compound sauce in the classic style: one line of instruction resting on a base recipe printed elsewhere in the chapter. Read it as a variation, not a standalone formula.
- The stray last line"1 cup Brown Sauce" looks like a printer's artifact, most likely the ingredient line or heading of the next entry in the sauce section rather than part of this recipe. It has no evident role in a hollandaise.
- You need the base firstThe recipe assumes a hollandaise printed elsewhere in the chapter and gives no quantity for it; a cup of finished sauce is a reasonable working assumption, but the yolk and butter proportions are not stated on this page. A full cup of chopped lobster into that much sauce gives a very heavy, almost salad-like mixture; half a cup is closer to modern taste if you want a sauce that still coats.
- Heat is the hingeFold the lobster in off the heat and only when it is at room temperature or barely warm. Cold lobster chills the emulsion and cool butter sets into grains; hot lobster or a return to the stove past about 160F scrambles the yolks and the sauce splits.
- CoralThe coral is the dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked. To dry and pound it, spread the cooked roe on a plate in a low oven until it crumbles, then work it to powder in a mortar. Lobster is often sold without it; if you have none, the sauce works without, though it loses both the rose color and the concentrated shellfish flavor.
- Nutmeg"Few gratings" means about 1/8 teaspoon at most. Nutmeg in quantity dominates butter and lemon quickly.
- Lobster meatChop cooked meat — claw and knuckle are ideal, being sweeter and less stringy than tail. Cut it small, around 1/4 inch, so the sauce still spoons cleanly.
- Yield and useRoughly two cups as written, or about a cup and a half if you cut the lobster back to half a cup; enough for four servings over poached fish, halibut steaks, boiled salmon, or asparagus. Serve at once; hollandaise will not hold above lukewarm and does not reheat.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, published its cook book in an era when American household manuals had absorbed the French system of mother sauces and their derivatives — hence a sauce chapter built as a set of one-line variations on hollandaise, béchamel and brown sauce. This particular variation belongs to the family of shellfish butters and coral sauces of French cookery: the roe was valued as a pigment as much as a flavoring, since dried and pounded coral tints a pale butter sauce a convincing pink. Boston had every reason to print it. New England lobster, often said to have once been cheap enough to be fed to servants and prisoners, had by 1900 become a hotel and dinner-party food, and a boiled fish under a coral-flecked hollandaise was exactly the sort of dish a middle-class cook was expected to be able to produce.