Home › Sauces for Meat and Vegetables › Lobster Sauce
Lobster Sauce
To White Sauce, add one half tablespoon lemon juice, one cup chopped lobster meat, and the dried and pounded lobster coral.
A short compound-sauce entry that assumes you already have the book's White Sauce standing by. It is a finishing formula rather than a standalone recipe, so the base and the yield need filling in.
- The white sauce it builds onA typical white sauce of this period runs about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked smooth and seasoned with salt and a little white pepper. On those proportions the base is roughly 1 cup, which the lobster brings up to about 1 1/2 cups. Check the book's own White Sauce entry for its exact quantities.
- Yield and useRoughly 1 1/2 cups if the base is a cup, enough for about four servings. Sauces of this type were generally served with boiled or baked white fish, salmon, halibut steaks, fish croquettes and timbales.
- Add the lobster off the heatThe meat is already cooked. Stir it in with the sauce barely at a simmer and serve within a few minutes; held hot or boiled, lobster turns fibrous and squeaky.
- Coral, and what to do without itCoral is the dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked. Dried in a slow oven and pounded to powder, it was used both to color and to bind. Coral is not always present in a lobster you buy, and without it the sauce simply comes out pale; a pinch of paprika gives the tint without the flavor.
- Work the coral in smoothlyPounded coral clumps in liquid. Rub it into a spoonful of soft butter or a little of the hot sauce first, then stir that back in, or you will get red specks rather than an even blush.
- Lemon lastHalf a tablespoon of lemon juice into a milk-based sauce can look curdled if the sauce is boiling hard. Add it at the end with the heat down and stir it through.
- Season after, not beforeLobster meat carries its own salt, and a well-salted white sauce plus a cup of lobster is often too much. Taste once the meat is in.
Lobster sauce belongs to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American habit of dressing plain boiled fish in a rich derivative of white sauce — the same logic that produced egg sauce, oyster sauce and shrimp sauce, all of them variations printed one after another in the sauce chapters of household cookbooks. The use of dried, pounded coral as both coloring and thickener is older than the book and was familiar practice in English kitchens, where "lobster butter" made from pounded coral and shell was often used as a garnish. That the recipe assumes a cup of lobster meat is casually available says something about the period, though how cheap or common cooked lobster from the New England and Maritime fisheries was at the time is less clear than it might appear: prices were rising in the early 1900s as the canning trade declined.