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Lobster Sauce
Remove the meat from a large lobster and cut it into one-fourth inch dice. Put the inner shells and scraggy parts into a saucepan with one quart of cold water and boil for fifteen to twenty minutes. Strain and use the water in making one pint of drawn butter sauce. Add the lobster, the dried and powdered coral, a little cayenne pepper and two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice.
A sauce built on two things a modern kitchen no longer keeps on hand: a stock made from the shells, and drawn butter sauce as a standing preparation. Both are easy, but neither is assumed anymore.
- Drawn butter sauceIn American books of this period this is not simply melted butter but a light flour-thickened butter sauce: butter cooked with about an equal quantity of flour, then whisked with the hot liquid — here the shell broth — and seasoned. Proportions vary from book to book; make it thin enough to coat, not to mound.
- Start with a cooked lobsterThe instruction to "remove the meat", together with the dried coral, presumes a boiled lobster rather than a raw one. The recipe specifies a large lobster; a modern 1 1/2 to 2 lb one yields roughly a cup or so of diced meat.
- The coralCoral is the roe of a hen lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red once cooked. It is dried in a low oven or on the back of the stove, then crushed to a powder and used mainly as colouring, with some slight thickening effect. Roe is not always present in lobsters sold today; without it the sauce is paler, and some cooks substitute a spoonful of tomato paste, though it is not the same flavour.
- Shell broth, not shell stockFifteen to twenty minutes is enough to draw flavour from the body shell and legs; the recipe is after a quick broth rather than a long-simmered stock.
- Add the meat off the heatAdd the meat at the end -- The diced lobster is already cooked and goes in last, needing only to warm through; prolonged cooking in the sauce will toughen it.
- Cayenne and lemonTwo tablespoons of lemon juice into a pint of sauce is assertive by modern taste; add half, then adjust. Both go in at the end, with the lobster.
- YieldA pint of drawn butter sauce plus the lobster meat and lemon juice, so somewhat more than a pint finished; enough to sauce several servings of poached fish, boiled salmon, or croquettes.
Lobster sauce of this kind was standard hotel and restaurant practice on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century, descended from the French sauce homard and its close relative sauce cardinal, whose name is conventionally traced to cardinal red, the colour of a cardinal's vestments. Lobster was already an expensive luxury item in New York dining rooms by the 1890s, having shed its earlier reputation as cheap coastal food. Drawn butter sauce, the base here, appears constantly in American cookbooks from the 1840s through the 1910s and then quietly disappears, absorbed into the general category of white sauce.