Lobster Sauce
1 Lobster 1/2 Tablespoon Cornstarch 1-5 Teaspoon Cayenne Pepper 1 Pint Boiling Water Lemon Juice Directions: Cut the lobster into dice.
Rub the "coral" to a paste with part of the butter. Make a sauce of the cornstarch, rest of butter and water, add the coral, and season to taste with lemon juice and salt. Simmer five minutes and strain over the diced lobster. Boil up once and serve.
A short Victorian-style fish sauce built on lobster coral rather than flour and cream. The ingredient list is incomplete in the original, so read the directions first and work backwards.
- Missing butterThe directions call for butter twice but the ingredient list omits it entirely, with no quantity given anywhere. Something like 2 oz (4 tablespoons) total would suit a pint of sauce: half worked into the coral, half used to cook out the cornstarch.
- "1-5 Teaspoon Cayenne"Almost certainly a broken fraction, most likely 1/8 or 1/4 teaspoon; a full teaspoon in a pint of sauce would overwhelm the lobster. Treat it as a pinch and add more at the end if wanted.
- The coralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red once cooked. It is what gives this sauce its colour and richness; the cornstarch does the thickening. Many market lobsters are male and have none; without it you get a pale sauce, so buy a hen lobster or accept the difference. The green tomalley is not a substitute for colour, though it adds flavour.
- Cooking the lobsterThe recipe assumes a lobster already boiled and picked. A 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly 4-6 oz of meat, enough for this quantity.
- Cornstarch, not rouxHalf a tablespoon of cornstarch to a pint of water gives a very loose, almost broth-like sauce. Slake it in cold water before it meets the boiling water, or it will lump. For a coating consistency use about 1 1/2 tablespoons.
- TimingSimmer the base five minutes as written to cook out the starch, but the "boil up once" over the diced meat should be seconds only. Lobster that has already been boiled turns cottony on a second cooking.
- StrainingStraining the sauce over the lobster removes the fibrous bits of coral and leaves a smooth, salmon-pink liquid. Push it through a fine sieve with the back of a spoon rather than letting it drip, or most of the colour stays behind.
- Yield and useMakes about a pint of sauce, plus the diced meat, enough for roughly six servings poured over poached or boiled white fish — cod, halibut, turbot — or over salmon. It is a sauce rather than a stew.
Lobster sauce belongs to the long nineteenth-century habit of serving one fish dressed in another: boiled cod or halibut arrived at table under a pink, coral-tinted sauce. The use of coral as colouring and enrichment is older than the cornstarch here — earlier English cookery pounded the roe with butter into a compound called lobster butter. The abbreviated instructions and the dropped ingredient suggest a compiler who expected a reader who already knew how to boil a lobster and how much butter a pint of sauce takes.