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Lobster Sauce II
1 1/4 lb. lobster 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne ½ tablespoon lemon juice 3 cups cold water Remove meat from lobster, and cut tender claw-meat in one-half inch dice. Chop remaining meat, add to body bones, and cover with water; cook until stock is reduced to two cups, strain, and add gradually to butter and flour cooked together, then add salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and lobster dice. If the lobster contains coral, prepare Lobster Butter, add flour, and thicken sauce therewith.
Sauce Béarnaise To Hollandaise Sauce II add one teaspoon each of finely chopped parsley and fresh tarragon or one-half tablespoon tarragon vinegar.
Served with mutton chops, steaks, broiled squabs, smelts, or boiled salmon.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the butter and flour quantities that open the recipe are missing from the printed lines — so this reads as a method rather than a formula. Farmer's standard white-sauce proportions elsewhere in the book fill the gap.
- The missing butter and flourFor two cups of lobster stock, something in the region of 4 tablespoons butter to 4 tablespoons flour will give a sauce of pouring consistency; the page itself gives no figures, so this is a reconstruction. Cook them together before the hot stock goes in gradually, or the sauce will be lumpy.
- Stock reduction is the whole pointThree cups of water over the chopped body meat and bones, cooked down to two, is what makes this taste of lobster rather than of flour. The recipe gives no time, only the target volume; do not shortcut it.
- Claw meat goes in lastThe half-inch dice are added at the end and only warmed through. Lobster held in a simmering sauce turns fibrous and squeaky within a few minutes.
- CoralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, dark greenish-black when raw and coral-red when cooked. Made into Lobster Butter with flour added, it both thickens and colours the sauce.
- Quantity of lobsterThe lobster itself is one of the lines missing from the printed ingredients; the method implies a single lobster, whose body bones make the stock and whose claw meat is diced.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is Farmer's term for the smallest quantity she measures: a trace, not a shake from a jar.
- YieldAbout two cups of sauce, following from the two cups of reduced stock; the recipe itself states no yield or number of servings.
- The Béarnaise fragmentThe second paragraph is a separate recipe that has run on from the same page. It depends on the book's Hollandaise Sauce II, and calls for fresh tarragon or tarragon vinegar — the vinegar version is noticeably sharper and less aromatic.
Lobster sauce belongs to the New England fish-dinner tradition that Fannie Farmer inherited and codified: a boiled or baked white fish sent to table masked in a shellfish sauce. The technique — making a concentrated stock, then binding it with a butter-and-flour roux — is straight French practice adapted to the American kitchen, and the Boston Cooking-School's fish-sauce chapter is essentially a drill book in that one method with the flavouring varied.