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Lobster Mousse
Lobster mousse may be prepared in the same way as chicken mousse, substituting lobster meat for chicken. 1 cup raw fish 1/4 cup almonds 1 teaspoon salt few drops onion juice
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: the method lives under Chicken Mousse, and what appears here is the short ingredient list for the forcemeat base. Read it as a French mousseline — pounded flesh, cream, and egg white, cooked gently in a mold.
- What the list actually isThe cup of raw fish, almonds, salt and onion juice read as the seasoning-and-binding base rather than the whole dish. The lobster meat and whatever liquid and binder are called for presumably come from the chicken mousse formula it points back to; without that page you are working from half a recipe.
- Raw fishThe intention is almost certainly lean white flesh — halibut, haddock, pike, sole — skinned, boned, and pounded smooth. Its proteins are what set the mousse; oily fish will not bind the same way and will fight the lobster.
- AlmondsBlanched sweet almonds, pounded to a paste in a mortar, used to enrich and lighten the forcemeat. A food processor does the pounding in seconds, but grind them with a little of the cream or egg white so they emulsify rather than turn oily.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a cloth. A few drops is genuinely a few drops; it was used where raw chopped onion would coarsen the texture.
- Lobster quantityThe original gives none. Two live 1 1/4-lb lobsters yield somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 cups picked meat, comfortably matching the cup of fish. Save the shells for a butter or sauce.
- The hinge: keep it coldA mousseline breaks if the cream warms while it is being worked in. Chill the bowl, the puree and the cream, add the cream in stages, and stop as soon as it is smooth and holding.
- Cooking the moldThe original gives no cooking instructions here. By the usual mousseline method: butter a timbale or charlotte mold, cover with buttered paper, and set it in a water bath in a moderate oven, around 350F, or steam it. It is done when the center reaches about 150-155F and a skewer comes out clean; overcooking squeezes the cream out and leaves it grainy.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no yield. On the quantities suggested here a quart mold would serve about six as an entree course. Turn it out and serve with a cream or lobster-butter sauce; cold, it wants a light mayonnaise.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, and it padded its chocolate chapters with a full general cookery course drawn from the Boston cooking-school tradition. The savory mousse belongs squarely to that tradition's French borrowings: a mousseline forcemeat of pounded flesh, cream and egg white, molded and poached, which American cooking schools taught as a showpiece of the entree course. Almonds pounded into fish forcemeat are an older habit still, generally traced to the medieval and early modern kitchen, where almond paste enriched dishes on fast days. Lobster in a Boston book of 1907 was neither the poor man's food of the early 1800s nor quite a luxury; it had become a standard entree protein, and the mousse was a way of stretching a small amount of picked meat across a table of six.