No. 488

Lobster Sauce, Lobster Sauce with Madeira Wine and Lobster Sauce with Lobster Butter

Sauce Homard, Sauce Homard au Vin de Madere et Sauce au Beurre de Homard

Lobster Sauce.—Place a pint of veloute sauce (No. 415), in a saucepan with pepper corns, thyme, bay leaf and a tablespoonful of chopped and blanched onions, cook all together, then strain through a tammy (No. 159); just when ready to serve incorporate in a piece of lobster butter (No. 580), and a dash of vinegar.

Lobster Sauce with Madeira Wine.—Put into a saucepan two gills of dry Madeira wine, one chopped shallot, a pinch of parsley leaves, mignonette and grated nutmeg, reduce with two gills of broth, and when well reduced add one pint of allemande sauce (No. 407) and two ounces of very red lobster butter (No. 580), strain through a tammy and drop in one ounce of lobster meat cut in three-sixteenth of an inch squares.

Lobster Sauce with Lobster Butter.—Have in a saucepan half veloute sauce (No. 415) and half Hollandaise (No. 477), a little water, salt, mignonette and nutmeg. When the sauce is very hot incorporate in a piece of lobster butter and some chopped parsley.

← No. 487 Lithuanian Sauce Hot Sauces No. 489 Lombarde Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three variations on one idea: a finished white sauce enriched at the last moment with lobster butter. Ranhofer assumes you have his mother sauces and his lobster butter already made, so most of the work happens outside this entry.

Add the lobster butter off the heatAdd the lobster butter last -- All three versions finish with lobster butter: the first "just when ready to serve," the third when the sauce is "very hot." Whisk it in a piece at a time and keep the sauce below a boil, since hard boiling risks splitting a butter-enriched sauce and dulling its colour.
Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of Madeira is one cup and two gills of broth another. A pint of velouté or allemande is two cups. The "piece" of lobster butter in the first and third sauces is unspecified; the Madeira version's two ounces per pint is a reasonable guide.
TammyA tammy (No. 159) was a worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois, or a conical strainer lined with damp cheesecloth and pressed with a ladle, does the same job.
MignonetteMignonette pepper is coarsely cracked white peppercorns, not a mignonette sauce. Crack them yourself. Note that the first two sauces are strained through a tammy after the pepper goes in; the third is not.
Velouté, allemande and HollandaiseVelouté (No. 415) is a white roux moistened with veal or chicken stock. Allemande (No. 407) is velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison and therefore must never simmer once the yolks are in. Both, and the Hollandaise, are separate recipes you need to make first.
Lobster butterNo. 580 is a shellfish butter, made by working cooked lobster shells and coral with butter, warming it and straining off the fat. The colour comes from the coral and the shell pigment, which is what Ranhofer means by asking for butter that is "very red."
The reduction in the Madeira versionReduce the wine with the aromatics first, then add the broth and reduce again; Ranhofer asks only that it be "well reduced" before the allemande goes in.
Yield and useThe first two start from a pint of sauce; the third gives no quantity. A pint will dress six to eight portions. These are sauces for poached fish, boiled turbot or salmon, lobster and shellfish timbales, not sauces to cook anything in.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how that kitchen worked: nothing is made from scratch at service time. Everything hangs on numbered preparations held ready in the larder, so a cook facing an order for lobster sauce reached for the day's velouté, the day's allemande, and a crock of lobster butter. The lobster butter itself belongs to a long French tradition of shellfish butters, pounded in a mortar to extract colour and flavour from shells that would otherwise be thrown out, and it is the reason these sauces read as thrift and luxury at the same time. The Madeira version reflects how thoroughly fortified wine had settled into American cooking of the period; dry Madeira sat on restaurant lines the way dry sherry or vermouth does now.