No. 1027

Lobster a la Britannia

Homard a la Britannia

Boil two lobsters of two pounds each in boiling water with some cut up carrots and onions, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and vinegar; cook for twenty to thirty minutes, then let the stock settle, and pour off the top steadily from the sediment; divide the bodies from the tails, take out the meat from the latter, also from the claws, and keep it warm in a little of the stock; take also the creamy parts from the bodies and rub them through a sieve. Reduce a pint of mushroom broth or essence (No. 392) with half a pint of veloute sauce (No. 415), and half a gill of meat glaze (No. 402), also one gill of Madeira wine; thicken it with four tablespoonfuls of bread-crumbs, and season with salt, red pepper, and nutmeg; add half a pound of mushroom heads, and half a pound of small artichoke bottoms cut in four. Escalop the lobster tails, dress them in a crown shape, and place the rest of the meats in the center, on top lay the mushrooms and artichoke bottoms, then finish the sauce by thickening with egg-yolks, butter, and cream, add some lemon juice, and chopped parsley, also the creamy parts from the bodies; pour the sauce over the lobster, and serve very hot.

← No. 1026 Lobster a la Bonnefoy Lobster No. 1028 Lobster a la Camille →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stocks and sauces already on hand; the cross-referenced numbers are the tell. Read the sauce as three ready-made components you will have to build or substitute before you start.

Cut the boiling timeTwenty to thirty minutes will turn a two-pound lobster to cotton. Around twelve to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer, timed from the moment the water returns to the boil, is nearer the mark for a two-pounder; the meat then finishes warming in the stock as directed.
The cooking liquid is a court bouillonCarrot, onion, parsley, thyme, bay and vinegar in water is a standard court bouillon. Salt it properly — about 1 tablespoon per quart — or the lobster will taste flat no matter what the sauce does.
Old unitsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of glaze is 1/4 cup and one gill of Madeira is 1/2 cup. A pint here is 2 cups, and half a pint of velouté is 1 cup.
The cross-referenced saucesNo. 415 velouté will be a white roux slackened with veal or chicken stock; No. 402 meat glaze is stock reduced to a syrup, of the sort sold now as glace de viande concentrate; No. 392 mushroom essence is mushroom trimmings simmered down and strained. A cup of strong mushroom stock reduced hard will stand in for the essence.
The creamy partsThis means the tomalley (the green liver) and, in a hen lobster, the coral. They are what give the finished sauce its colour and depth, though health advisories now warn against eating tomalley, which concentrates toxins and contaminants. Sieve them cold and whisk them in off the heat at the end, as written.
The hinge: the liaisonOnce the egg yolks, butter and cream go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle and break. Temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return the lot to low heat and stir until it coats a spoon, then add lemon juice last — acid into a hot yolk sauce is where it usually splits.
EscalopTo escalop a lobster tail is to slice it crosswise into neat medallions, not to bake it in a dish. Slice on a slight bias for wider pieces when arranging the crown.
Artichoke bottomsHalf a pound of trimmed bottoms means starting from roughly half a dozen artichokes, though the recipe calls for small ones. Good-quality tinned or frozen bottoms, rinsed and quartered, are the practical route.
YieldTwo two-pound lobsters with a pound of vegetables and roughly a quart of finished sauce serves six as a course, four generously.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this is a characteristic entry: a plainly boiled lobster reassembled into architecture, with a sauce assembled from three other numbered recipes in the same book. The nineteenth-century French kitchen named dishes freely after nations, sovereigns and ships, and à la Britannia belongs to that habit rather than to any documented British cooking — nothing in the method is English, and the velouté, glaze and egg-yolk liaison are pure Paris in style, though the line back to Carême and Urbain Dubois is more atmosphere than documented derivation. What the recipe really shows is how a great restaurant used lobster: two whole animals broken down, the shells' cooking liquid saved, the tomalley and coral sieved back into the sauce so that nothing edible left the kitchen. The crown arrangement of escaloped tail with the claw meat heaped inside completes the effect.