Lemon Sauce
Add one lemon sliced, and seeded, and the juice of another lemon to one-half pint of butter sauce and boil together for a few minutes.
LOBSTER SAUCE, No. 1-This may be served with all kinds of boiled fish. For it, use one lobster; two tablespoons of flour; four tablespoons of butter; two tablespoons of lemon juice; one pint of boiling water. Cut the meat into small pieces, and pound the coral together with a tablespoon of butter. Rub the flour and the rest of the butter to a smooth paste. Add the water to the coral and butter, and then the lemon juice, and simmer for four minutes. Strain the sauce over the lobster meat, place the whole on the fire and boil up once.
LOBSTER SAUCE, No. 2- This is also used with boiled fish. One lobster, one-half pint of drawn-butter sauce; salt and pepper to taste. Break up the coral of the lobster, and put it on a paper in a slow oven for thirty minutes. Then pound it in a mortar, and sprinkle it over the boiled fish when ready to serve. Chop the lobster meat, not too fine, and add it to the sauce, also putting in a pinch of the coral and the salt and pepper. The effect is spoiled if the lobster is cut too fine. The sauce should be like a creamy bed for the lobster.
Three short sauces run together in one paragraph: a lemon sauce and two lobster sauces, all built on the same base. The base is the thing the book assumes you already know.
- "Butter sauce" and "drawn-butter sauce"The book uses the two terms interchangeably here, and in books of this period both normally mean a flour-thickened butter sauce: a light roux loosened with hot water or fish stock, seasoned, often with more butter beaten in off the heat. It is not clarified butter, and not hollandaise. Make it first; each of the three sauces here is a variation on it.
- Half a pintOne cup. That is the base quantity for the lemon sauce and for Lobster Sauce No. 2; No. 1 instead starts from a pint of boiling water and so makes considerably more.
- Boil the lemon only briefly"A few minutes" is the outer limit. Sliced lemon with peel and pith attached can turn the sauce bitter if it sits at a simmer. Two to three minutes, then pull it.
- CoralThe dark green roe found only in hen lobsters, which turns coral red on cooking. A lobster bought already cooked or split may well not have any. Without coral, both lobster sauces still work; you lose the colour and a little richness, and in No. 2 you simply skip the dried-and-pounded garnish.
- A slow ovenConventionally reckoned somewhere around 250-300F. Thirty minutes on paper dries the coral enough to crumble in a mortar; watch it, because it scorches and turns acrid rather than browning.
- One lobsterNo size is given; assume a small market lobster, cooked and picked. Add the meat at the very end. In No. 1 the sauce is boiled up "once" after the meat goes in, which means brought just to a bubble and removed; lobster held at a simmer toughens.
- The instruction the book bothers to repeatDo not cut the lobster small -- in No. 2, which says outright that the effect is spoiled if the lobster is cut too fine and wants visible pieces sitting in the sauce. Note that No. 1 goes the other way and asks for the meat cut into small pieces.
- SeasoningNo. 1 gives no salt at all. A flour-and-water base needs it; season the sauce before the lobster goes in, and taste again after, since lobster meat carries its own salt.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, and it organises sauces as a set of variations on one mother sauce rather than as separate recipes. That mother sauce is drawn butter, the plain flour-thickened butter sauce that served American kitchens where a French kitchen would have used velouté but add lemon or lobster and it dresses fish. The lobster versions belong to a tradition in which lobster could be treated as a garnish for other fish rather than the centrepiece, and in which the coral was prized as both a thickener and a colouring, dried and pounded for the same purpose that a modern cook might reach for paprika or tomato paste.