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Lobster Butter
Take the head and spawn of some hen lobsters, put them in a mortar and pound; add an equal quantity of fresh butter, and pound both together, being sure that they are thoroughly mixed. Pass this through a fine hair sieve, and the butter is then ready for use. It is very nice for garnishing or for making sandwiches.
Maitre d'Hotel Butter Put a quarter of a pound of butter, two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley, a little salt and pepper, together with the juice of two lemons in a basin, and mix them well together, keeping in a cool place.
Two compound butters run together in the original: a lobster butter for color and garnish, and the standard maître d'hôtel butter. Both are simple, but the lobster butter depends entirely on what you put into the mortar.
- Use a cooked lobsterThe "head" means the body section with its tomalley and the coral (roe) of a hen lobster. The recipe does not say whether the lobster is raw or cooked; take the coral and tomalley from one that has been fully cooked, since raw shellfish roe pounded into a butter that is never heated is not something to serve on sandwiches.
- Hen lobster and spawnThe "spawn" is the dark green raw coral that turns brilliant scarlet on cooking, and it is the whole point of the recipe: it is what colors the butter. Only females carry it, and most lobsters sold today are not sorted by sex, so ask the fishmonger or expect to make do with tomalley alone and a duller result.
- Equal quantityMatch the pounded coral and tomalley by weight, not volume, with unsalted butter at cool room temperature. A quarter pound of butter to a quarter pound of coral is a generous batch; most cooks get far less coral than that from one lobster and should scale down.
- Mortar and hair sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but the sieving is not optional: it removes membrane and grit and is what makes the butter smooth enough to pipe or spread. Push it through a fine mesh sieve with a rubber spatula, or a drum sieve if you have one.
- The shells are worth using tooThe classic French version melts the pounded shells and butter together over gentle heat, then strains and chills so the reddened butter sets above the water. Oscar's cold method is quicker and keeps a fresher flavor, but the warm method extracts more color from the shell debris.
- KeepingRoll in parchment into a log and refrigerate up to three days, or freeze for a month. It is a seasoning, not a spread eaten by the spoonful: a coin melted onto broiled fish, or a thin layer on bread under sliced lobster.
- Two lemons is a lotFor the maitre d'hotel butter, a quarter pound of butter with the juice of two lemons will slacken and may separate. Start with one lemon, taste, and add more; most later versions use far less, on the order of a tablespoon of juice or less to four ounces of butter.
- YieldThe maître d'hôtel butter makes about half a cup, enough to finish six to eight steaks or fillets. Chill it firm before slicing into rounds.
Compound butters were the backbone of nineteenth-century garnishing, and a kitchen the size of the Waldorf's would have kept several going at once: anchovy, ravigote, montpellier, and this one. Oscar Tschirky, hired as maître d'hôtel when the Waldorf opened in 1893, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a volume that collects the French repertoire then standard in American hotel kitchens alongside plainer domestic fare. Lobster butter belongs squarely to the French side of that inheritance — Escoffier codified beurre de homard in much the same terms a few years later — and it exists because the coral of a hen lobster is one of the few natural sources of a deep red that survives being folded into fat. Maître d'hôtel butter, the parsley-and-lemon butter that follows it here, is the most durable of the whole family and still turns up melting on a steak.<br><br>The pairing of the two on one page is itself telling: the first is a garnish for a banquet, the second a workhorse the line cook made by the pound.