No. 580

Lobster and Spiny Lobster Coral Butter

Beurre au Corail de Homard ou de Langouste

Lobster Butter.-Pound one pound of very red spiny lobster shells with two pounds of butter until they are reduced to a paste; put this into a saucepan till the butter be cooked and clarified, then strain it through a piece of muslin into a bowl. As soon as the butter has thrown off its first heat, begin beating it with a spoon till it gets cold, and if needed to be dyed a deeper red shade, then add to it a little orchanet, melted in a small quantity of butter, or clear vegetal carmine.

Coral Butter.-Take some lobster eggs, also the red parts found in the interior of the body and crush them very finely in a mortar; mix in a piece of fresh butter four times the volume of the eggs; pass the whole through a Venice sieve and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two related preparations: a cooked butter drawn from lobster shells, and a raw butter bound with the coral. Both exist to colour and flavour sauces rather than to be eaten by the spoonful.

The hinge: never let the butter brownThe whole point is to draw the red pigment (astaxanthin, released from the shell protein by heat) into the fat without cooking it dark. Melt over the lowest possible heat, or set the pan in a 200-225F oven, and pull it as soon as the butter is clear and the shells have given up their colour. Browned butter turns the finished product muddy tan.
Scale it downOne pound of shells to two pounds of butter is a hotel quantity. Keep the proportion -- twice the weight of butter to shells -- and work with whatever quantity of carcasses you have.
Pounding, without a mortarA food processor handles the shells far better than a bowl and pestle. Break the carcasses up first, pulse to coarse gravel with the softened butter, and accept that some shell fragments will remain behind.
StrainingMuslin is cheesecloth, doubled. Set it over a bowl of ice water if you want the butter to solidify into a cake you can lift off the liquid beneath; that liquid is lobster essence and is worth saving for a sauce or bisque.
Beating until coldThis is not decoration. Butter left to set undisturbed goes grainy as the fat crystallises unevenly; working it with a spoon as it cools keeps the texture smooth and spreadable.
Skip the orchanetOrchanet is alkanet root (Alkanna tinctoria), once a standard red colouring for butters and pomades. It contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is not permitted as a food colour today. "Vegetal carmine" is a vague nineteenth-century trade term for a plant-derived red. Sweet paprika bloomed in a little of the warm butter, or a spoonful of tomato paste, will deepen the colour with no risk.
A "Venice sieve"A sieve of fine silk bolting cloth. A drum sieve or a fine-mesh conical strainer, worked with a plastic scraper, does the same job.
Coral butter is rawThe second preparation is uncooked roe folded into butter. Take the coral from lobsters that have been cooked through, keep it refrigerated, and use it within a day or two. It is most often whisked into a hot sauce at the finish, where it thickens the sauce and turns it scarlet.
Storage and useBoth butters freeze well; roll into a log in parchment and cut discs as needed. A tablespoon finishes a sauce for fish, enriches a bisque, or mounts the pan juices from a grilled lobster.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its opening chapters on stocks, forcemeats and compound butters are lifted straight from the French professional tradition he trained in — the same system codified by Carême and later by Escoffier. Compound butters were the working colour box of that kitchen: green from herbs, red from lobster, and the shell butter here did double duty as flavouring and dye at a time when a bisque was expected to arrive a vivid coral pink. Langouste is the spiny or rock lobster, clawless and warm-water, whose shell is generally reckoned to give a redder butter than the American clawed lobster. The instruction to reach for orchanet if the colour falls short is a reminder of how freely nineteenth-century professional cooks borrowed from the dyer's and apothecary's shelves — a habit that food-adulteration law spent the following half-century curtailing.