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Lobster Soup
248. Take the meat from the claws, bodies, and tails of six small lobsters; take away the brown fur, and the bag in the head; beat the fins, chine, and small claws in a mortar. Boil very gently in two quarts of water, with the crumb of a French roll, some white pepper, salt, two anchovies, a large onion, sweet herbs, and a bit of lemonpeel, till you have extracted the goodness of them all. Strain it off. Beat the spawn in a mortar, with a bit of butter, a quarter of a nutmeg, and a tea-spoonful of flour; mix it with a quart of cream. Cut the tails into pieces, and give them a boil up with the cream and soup. Serve with forcemeat-balls made of the remainder of the lobsters. mace, pepper, salt, a few crumbs, and an egg or two. Let the balls be made up with a bit of flour, and heated in the soup.
An eighteenth-century style shellfish soup that builds its own stock from the shells and thickens with bread, coral and cream. The critical point is restraint at the end: the tail meat and the cream go in for a moment only.
- Don't boil the finishOnce the coral-and-cream mixture joins the strained stock, hold it just below a simmer. "Give them a boil up" was written for a hearth pot; a hard boil will curdle the cream and toughen the tail meat, which needs no more than two or three minutes to warm through.
- What to removeThe "brown fur" is the feathery gills at the sides of the body cavity, and the "bag in the head" is the gritty stomach sac behind the eyes. Both are discarded. The soft green tomalley and the red coral are kept.
- Chine and finsThe chine is the body shell and the fins are the small tail flippers. Pounding them in a mortar exposes more surface for the stock; a heavy rolling pin in a bowl, or a few pulses in a food processor, does the same work.
- SpawnThe spawn is the coral, the dark roe found only in hen lobsters, which turns coral-red on cooking and both colours and thickens the soup. Not every lobster will have it. If yours have none, the tomalley pounded with the butter gives flavour, though the colour will be muted.
- Six small lobsters"small" is not defined in the recipe; something in the region of a pound apiece is a plausible reading. Two larger lobsters of 1 1/2 to 2 lb plus all their shells will stand in, though they give less meat, so scale the liquid down accordingly.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts is 8 cups of water; a quart of cream is 4 cups, which many will find dominates the soup. Half that, made up with more stock, gives a lighter result. The crumb of a French roll means the soft interior of one small white bread roll, perhaps a cup loosely packed, and it is the thickener alongside the teaspoon of flour.
- AnchoviesTwo whole salted anchovies, as the recipe intends; two salted fillets will do. They dissolve into the stock and read as depth rather than fish; do not leave them out.
- Forcemeat ballsBind the remaining lobster meat with mace, pepper, salt, a handful of fine crumbs and one or two eggs, roll walnut-sized balls, dust with flour and poach them in the soup for three or four minutes at a bare simmer.
- YieldAs written this makes a great deal of soup: eight to ten first-course servings.