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Stewed Lobster Bordelaise
Add to one wineglassful of red wine in a stewpan one chopped shallot and half of a small carrot, cut into exceedingly small pieces. Boil for five minutes, put in the meat from two boiled lobsters, cut into pieces, which should weight about one and one-half pounds, one pinch of salt, one-third pinch of pepper, and a very little nutmeg, and finally one-half pint of veloute sauce. Stew well together for five minutes and serve very hot.
A quick à la minute stew that assumes you already have velouté on hand and lobsters already boiled. Everything hinges on the fact that the lobster is cooked before it goes in the pan.
- The lobster is already cookedTwo boiled lobsters yielding 1½ lb of picked meat means large lobsters; picked meat is only about a quarter to a third of live weight, so figure something like 2½ to 3 lb each. The five minutes of stewing at the end is only to heat the meat through and glaze it in the sauce; carry it further and the tail meat turns fibrous and squeaky.
- A wineglassfulIn Oscar's kitchen this is about 2 fl oz, a scant quarter cup, not a modern 6-oz pour. Use a dry red; five minutes at a boil is meant to soften the shallot and carrot and cook off the raw alcohol.
- Cut the vegetables properly"Exceedingly small pieces" means a brunoise of about 1/8 inch. Half a small carrot cut that fine will be tender in the five-minute boil; anything coarser will still be crunchy when the dish is served.
- VeloutéHalf a pint is one cup. Velouté is a blond roux slackened with white stock — veal or chicken in the original scheme, though fish or shellfish stock suits lobster better. It should be thick enough to coat a spoon before it meets the wine, since no further reduction is intended.
- Nutmeg"A very little" is literal: a scrape or two off a whole nutmeg. It is there as a background note against the red wine, and it is very easy to make the dish taste of nothing else.
- Heat levelOnce the velouté goes in, keep the pan just below a simmer. A flour-thickened sauce at a hard boil will break or scorch on the bottom while you are waiting out the five minutes.
- Yield1½ lb of lobster meat in a cup of sauce serves four as a main course, six as a first course. Serve in hot dishes — the sauce chills fast and dulls.
Bordelaise in classical French cooking means red wine, shallots and usually beef marrow, a sauce built for grilled meat; the name simply points to Bordeaux and its wine. Applying it to shellfish is often said to have been a nineteenth-century restaurant habit — lobster à la bordelaise appears in the French repertoire in various forms, generally with the wine, the shallot and a fine dice of aromatics standing in for the marrow. Oscar Tschirky's version is stripped down to the essentials of a hotel line: a pan sauce made in minutes and finished with velouté drawn from the day's stockpot, so that a dish carrying a grand name could go out to a Waldorf table as fast as the order came in. That reliance on pre-made mother sauces and pre-boiled lobster is arguably the real signature of the period's large-hotel kitchen, where comparatively little, one imagines, was started from scratch after the guests sat down.