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Lobster Butter
¼ cup butter Lobster coral Clean, wipe, and force coral through a fine sieve. Put in a mortar with butter, and pound until well blended. This butter is used in Lobster Soup and Sauces to give color and richness.
Hollandaise Sauce I 1/2 cup butter Yolks 2 eggs 1 tablespoon lemon juice ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1/3 cup boiling water Put butter in a bowl, cover with cold water, and wash, using a spoon. Divide in three pieces; put one piece in a saucepan with yolks of eggs and lemon juice, place saucepan in a larger one containing boiling water, and stir constantly with a wire whisk until butter is melted; then add second piece of butter, and, as it thickens, third piece. Add water, cook one minute, and season with salt and cayenne. If mixture curdles, add two tablespoons heavy cream.
A compound butter made from lobster roe, used as a coloring and flavoring agent rather than a sauce in its own right. The measurements as printed need a little translation.
- The butter quantityThe "14 cup butter" is a quarter cup, 4 tablespoons or 2 oz. Use unsalted butter at cool room temperature so it will take the coral without melting.
- What coral isCoral is the roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and bright coral-red once cooked. A supermarket lobster is as likely to be male as female, so you cannot count on getting any; a hen lobster may yield anywhere from a spoonful to several, and the recipe itself sets no quantity against the butter.
- Cook the roe firstThe color and the sieving both depend on the coral being set. Raw roe stays a dull gray-green and smears rather than passing through a sieve; it turns red only with heat, so use coral from a lobster that has been boiled or steamed.
- Mortar and sieveThe fine sieve removes membrane and is worth doing even if you then work the mixture in a small food processor instead of pounding it. Press the coral through with the back of a spoon, then blend until the butter is uniformly orange-red with no dark flecks.
- How it is usedThis is a finishing butter, whisked cold into a soup or sauce off the heat to tint and enrich it. Boiling it dulls the color and can make the roe grainy.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1/3 cup, enough to finish a quart of lobster bisque. Roll it in parchment and refrigerate up to three days, or freeze for a few months.
- On the hollandaise that followsThat sauce calls for washing the butter under cold water to rinse out salt and milk solids, an old step made largely unnecessary by unsalted butter. It uses 1/2 cup of butter, two yolks and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Note that the book directs the outer pan to hold boiling water; modern practice is to keep it hot but below a hard boil so the yolks do not scramble before the butter is incorporated.
Lobster butter belongs to a family of French beurres compos\century-century professional kitchens kept on hand to color and enrich sauces: crayfish butter, shrimp butter, anchovy butter, green butter of herbs. Fannie Farmer's inclusion of it in a household manual shows how far the Boston Cooking School reached toward restaurant technique, mortar and all. The reliance on coral also reflects a period when cooks bought whole live lobsters and used every part of them, the tomalley and the roe included, rather than picked meat by the pound.