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Lobster Butter
This is used in lobster soups and sauces to give color and richness. Pound to a smooth paste the coral of a lobster with two tablespoons of butter; add three tablespoons of chopped lobster and one of butter and pound again until all is reduced to a smooth paste, and then rub through a fine sieve. If coral is not obtainable the small claws and butter may be pounded together and treated the same as shrimp butter.
MAITRE d' HÔTEL SAUCE Two tablespoons of flour; one tablespoon of chopped parsley; one tablespoon of lemon juice; three-fourths cup of butter; one pint of boiling water; two eggs (yolks only); salt and pepper to taste. Prepare the same as drawn-butter sauce and when finished add the lemon juice and chopped parsley. Let it cool slightly, and add the beaten yolks of the eggs. Return to the range, and when well heated, but not to the boiling point, it is ready to use.
Two things on one page: a compound butter for tinting and enriching lobster soups and sauces, and a maître d'hôtel sauce that is really an egg-enriched drawn butter. Both live or die by heat control.
- Coral, and where to get itThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and vivid red once cooked. Only hen lobsters carry it, so it comes as a byproduct of cooking whole lobsters rather than something to buy. The tomalley (the soft green liver) is sometimes pounded in with it for flavour, though it contributes brown rather than red.
- The point is colourCoral turns scarlet with heat, and pounding it into butter distributes that pigment through a fat that will later melt into a soup or sauce. If you skip the coral and use claw meat and shells as the recipe permits, you get flavour but a much paler result.
- Sieve or processorA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the paste through a fine sieve afterwards. Shell fragments and membrane will not break down, and they are unpleasant in a finished sauce.
- Yield and useThe quantities give roughly a third of a cup of finished butter, enough to finish a quart of bisque or a pint of sauce. Whisk it in off the heat at the last moment; boiling it will separate the butter and dull the colour.
- Keeping itRoll the strained butter in parchment and refrigerate up to three days, or freeze for a couple of months. It is worth making whenever you cook a hen lobster rather than waiting until a recipe calls for it.
- "Prepare the same as drawn-butter sauce"Drawn butter in American cookery of this period is a flour-thickened sauce, not the clarified butter the term means in a modern seafood restaurant; the two tablespoons of flour in the ingredient list point the same way. In practice that means melting part of the butter, stirring in the flour, adding the boiling water gradually, then finishing with the remaining butter in pieces.
- The egg yolks are the hingeTemper the beaten yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce before returning everything to the pan, and keep it well below a simmer. Once it boils the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks; the original's "not to the boiling point" is doing real work.
- Butter quantityThree-quarters of a cup of butter to a pint of water is very rich by current standards. Half a cup makes a sauce that still coats fish and is less likely to split.
Lobster butter is the English name for beurre de homard, one of the compound shellfish butters of French professional cookery, where crayfish, shrimp and lobster butters were kept as standing preparations to finish bisques and to tint sauces without thinning them. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, put out its cook book in the era when American domestic science was codifying restaurant technique for the home, which is why a sauce chapter organised on French lines sits beside plain family cooking. The instruction to fall back on the small claws is a frugal touch: the thin walking legs hold little meat but plenty of flavour, and pounding them with butter and straining extracts what picking never would.