Lobster Sauce
INGREDIENTS for 1 tureen. -1 small crab; salt, pounded mace and cayenne to taste 1/2 pint of melted butter made with milk. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Choose a nice fresh crab, pick all the meat away from the shell, and cut it into small square pieces. Make 1/2 pint of melted butter, put in the fish and seasoning; let it gradually warm through, and simmer for 2 minutes; it should not boil.
The heading says lobster but the ingredient list says crab — a slip that survived several editions of Beeton, where the crab and lobster sauces sit side by side and use identical method. Either shellfish works; the technique is the same.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a plain flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and flour worked together, then stirred smooth with the liquid, here milk. Simply pouring warm butter over the crab will not give you what the recipe intends.
- Half a pintImperial, so 10 fl oz — about 1 1/4 US cups. Made with milk it should be the thickness of pouring cream; loosen with a spoonful more milk if it tightens as the crab meat goes in.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. A flour-thickened milk sauce carrying picked shellfish will split and turn grainy at a rolling boil, and the crab goes stringy. Keep it at a bare shiver for the two minutes stated.
- Pounded maceBlade mace ground in a mortar; a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace is a reasonable amount for this quantity of sauce. Nutmeg comes from the same fruit but is stronger and less delicate, and needs a lighter hand.
- Picking the crabA "small crab" here means a whole cooked one, perhaps 1 1/2 lb, yielding 5-6 oz of meat. Use both white and brown meat — the brown dissolves into the sauce and carries most of the flavour, the white gives the square pieces the recipe asks for.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a warming note rather than heat for its own sake: a pinch. Salt cautiously, since crab is already saline.
- Yield and servingEnough for about four alongside a poached or boiled white fish — turbot, cod, brill. Make it while the fish cooks; it does not hold or reheat well.
- Average cost, 1s.A shilling in the 1860s, given per tureen. Beeton's costings are a period reference point rather than a guide to anything now.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the Victorian English kitchen — Beeton gives several versions, with water, with milk, thick and thin — and dressing it up with picked shellfish, capers, anchovy or parsley produced most of the sauce repertoire served with boiled fish. Lobster sauce in particular was near-obligatory with turbot and salmon at a formal dinner, which is why the two versions of it sit close together in the book. Crab brings brown meat, which lobster does not offer in the same quantity, giving a fuller sauce. The instruction that it "should not boil" recurs throughout Beeton's sauce chapter, and reflects a kitchen where sauces were held near a range for long stretches and split easily.