No. 2537

Mousseline of Lobster

Mousseline de Homard

Select a plain cylindrical mold (Fig. 150) and incrust it in pounded ice; cut some crosswise slices of large green gherkins, of equal size and thickness, lift them up with the pointed end of a larding needle, dip into half-set jelly, and then arrange them symmetrically against the sides of the mold; coat this decoration lightly with jelly. Cut up into quarter-inch dice the claw meat of four lobsters and enclose them in a small saucepan. Pound the tail meat with two or three spoonfuls of bechamel (No. 409), pass it through a sieve and return it to the mortar to pound once more, adding three or four gills of blond chaudfroid sauce (No. 596), a few spoonfuls of jelly (No. 103) and a few drops of tarragon vinegar; season highly and set the preparation in a saucepan to thicken lightly while stirring on ice; incorporate into this five or six spoonfuls of well-drained whipped cream. After this preparation is well smoothed add to it the dice pieces of claw meat and with the whole fill up the coated mold; put on ice for one hour. Just when ready to serve dip the mold in warm water and invert the contents on a dish having a small support fastened to the center; on top of this place a hatelet garnished with fine shrimps or crawfish of graduated sizes, and serve at the same time a separate mayonnaise sauce (No. 606).

← No. 2536 Mousseline of Kingfish a la Briere Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2538 Mousseline of Pheasants, Princess →

For the Modern Kitchen

A cold lobster mousse set in an aspic-lined mold, from the era when the garde-manger built dishes to be looked at as much as eaten. Almost every step depends on temperature control, and the whole thing collapses if the base gets warm.

The hinge: work everything over iceThe chaud-froid base must be thickening but still fluid when the whipped cream goes in. Too warm and the cream deflates into soup; too cold and it sets in lumps that will show as streaks when the mousse is cut. Stir over an ice bath and stop the moment it coats the spoon.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so three or four gills of blond chaud-froid is 1½ to 2 cups. The "few spoonfuls" of jelly and the five or six of whipped cream are probably tablespoon measures, but the book does not say so here; they are genuinely approximate, so judge by texture.
The lobster is already cookedThe recipe assumes cooked lobster meat throughout. Use meat from four cooked lobsters, chilled, tails for the purée and claws for the dice; the yield of picked meat will depend on the size of the lobsters, which the recipe does not specify.
Mortar and sievePounding, sieving, then pounding again was the standard route to a smooth purée. A food processor followed by a pass through a fine drum sieve or tamis gets you there; the sieving is worth keeping, since lobster fibre reads as stringiness in a cold mousse.
Chaud-froid and jelly"Blond chaud-froid" is a velouté-based sauce set with aspic, and No. 103 is a clarified savoury jelly. Both are gelatin-set sauces; if you substitute, remember that the whole mousse stands or falls on the gelatin already in them, and there is none added later.
Incrusting the mold in ice"Pounded ice" is crushed ice, packed around the mold so the decorative jelly sets on contact. A metal mold set in an ice-and-water bath does the same job. Modern refrigeration makes the ice bed less critical, but it still sets the gherkin slices faster than a fridge shelf will.
HateletAn hâtelet is an ornamental skewer, often silver or silver-plated, threaded here with shrimp or crawfish graded by size and set on the small support at the centre of the dish. Purely decorative, and entirely omittable; a plain skewer or nothing at all leaves the dish unharmed.
UnmoldingA brief dip in warm water, then invert. Any longer and the gherkin decoration melts out of its jelly and slides.

A Little History

This belongs to the cold-dish section of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his roughly three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the garde-manger's craft at its most elaborate: a mousse whose colour, decoration and silhouette were all fixed before a guest ever saw it. The technique is chaud-froid — a sauce enriched with aspic so it sets firm when cold — one of the main ways a nineteenth-century kitchen could make a cold dish hold a shape and take a decoration. "Mousseline" here signals the lightening with whipped cream rather than any relation to the modern hot mousseline forcemeat. Ranhofer's cross-references to numbered sauces are characteristic of the book, which was built as a working kitchen system rather than a set of standalone recipes; a cook was expected to have béchamel, aspic and chaud-froid already at hand.