No. 1039

Lobster, Provencal Style

Homard a la Provencale

Divide into equal pieces two medium sized raw lobster tails, season them with salt and mignonette, and saute them in oil over a very hot fire, turning them round so that they color nicely on both sides. Mince up very finely eight ounces of onions, cutting them first in halves, and suppressing the root and stalk, put them in with the lobster with salt, pepper, mignonette, a bunch of parsley, garnished with thyme and bay leaf, half a pint of tomato sauce (No. 549), and four spoonfuls of burnt brandy, boil a few minutes; take out the pieces of lobster, strain the sauce through a sieve, and reduce it over a brisk fire with a bottleful of white wine, despumate the sauce, and when nearly reduced, put back the lobster, season to taste, and serve.

← No. 1038 Lobster a la Paul Bert Lobster No. 1040 Lobster Roasted on the Spit →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade with stock sauces already made and a range that can hold a hard boil. The method is sound, but three of his terms and one of his quantities need translating before you start.

The hinge: get the lobster out earlyRaw lobster tail is cooked through in four to five minutes of sauteing and simmering. The recipe has you lift the pieces before the sauce is reduced for a reason -- leave them in through the wine reduction and they turn cottony. Return them only to warm through at the end.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked pepper, usually white peppercorns, not a modern mignonette sauce or the flower. Crush them under a pan rather than grinding, so you get the crunch and the perfume; it appears in the seasoning alongside "pepper," which may mean a coarse grind was wanted as well as a fine one.
Burnt brandyBrandy that has been warmed and set alight to burn off the raw spirit before it goes in. A "spoonful" in cookbooks of this period is normally a tablespoon, so read four spoonfuls as roughly four tablespoons. Flame it away from the extractor hood and off the heat source.
A bottleful of white wineThat is roughly 750 ml, an enormous amount for two tails, and it makes sense only if you reduce it hard as instructed -- it is there to build the sauce, not to poach anything. Half that quantity gives a workable sauce in a home pan without an hour of boiling.
Half a pint of tomato sauceOne cup, and Ranhofer's No. 549 is a cooked kitchen tomato sauce from his sauce chapter, not raw passata. A thick, well-seasoned tomato sauce or a reduced tomato coulis stands in; skip anything sweetened or herbed for pasta.
DespumateSkim. As the wine reduces, protein and impurities rise as grey foam; lift it off with a spoon or ladle so the finished sauce is clear and clean-tasting rather than muddy.
The onionsEight ounces is about 225 g, a large onion and a half. Halving them and cutting out root and stalk before mincing is not fussiness -- those parts stay fibrous and will not soften into the sauce in the few minutes given.
YieldTwo medium tails serve two as a main course, four as a first course. Serve it in shallow bowls with the sauce spooned over and bread or plain rice; no garnish is specified.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his house repertory written out for professionals -- hence the cross-references to numbered sauces and the assumption that stock is on hand. "A la Provencale" in nineteenth-century French kitchen usage signalled the trio of oil, garlic or onion, and tomato, and it was applied freely to whatever the market offered; the dish is a close cousin of what most cooks now know as lobster or crayfish a l'Americaine, or the Breton claim to the same preparation, a l'Armoricaine. Ranhofer's version leans on onion rather than garlic, which is a little unusual for the label and may reflect American taste of the period. Lobster itself had by the 1890s completed its climb from cheap coastal protein and bait to a restaurant luxury, and the Lobster chapter of this book -- dozens of numbered preparations running from croquettes to roasting on a spit -- is a record of how much a fashionable kitchen was expected to do with it.