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Lobster Soup
Mrs. Robert Harris.
One large lobster or two small ones; pick all the meat from the shell and chop fine; scald one quart of milk and one pint of water; then add the lobster, one pound of butter, a tablespoonful of flour, and salt and red pepper to taste. Boil ten minutes and serve hot.
A plain nineteenth-century milk-based lobster soup, closer to a chowder base than a bisque. Two things in the text need attention before you start: the butter quantity and the boiling.
- The pound of butterOne pound of butter in three pints of liquid is almost certainly a compositor's error or a very different sense of richness; 4 tablespoons (2 oz) gives a soup that still tastes buttery and does not break. If you want to be faithful to the spirit of it, go to 1/4 lb and no further.
- Start with cooked lobster"Pick all the meat from the shell" assumes a lobster already boiled; boiled lobsters were commonly sold ready-cooked. One large lobster means roughly 1.5-2 lb live weight, yielding somewhere around 5-8 oz of meat.
- Do not actually boil it ten minutesTen minutes at a hard boil risks scorching or curdling the milk and will turn the lobster fibrous. Bring the milk and water to a bare simmer, add the lobster, and hold it below simmering for two to three minutes -- just long enough to heat through.
- The flourA single tablespoon of flour in three pints thickens almost nothing; it may be there mainly to help hold the butter in suspension. Work it into the softened butter as a paste and whisk that in, rather than adding dry flour to hot milk.
- Red pepperThis means cayenne, not paprika or a fresh chili. A scant 1/8 teaspoon is plenty for this volume; it should sharpen the lobster, not announce itself.
- Use the shellsThe recipe discards them, but simmering the broken shells in the pint of water for 20 minutes and straining before you add the milk costs nothing and noticeably increases the lobster flavor.
- YieldAbout three pints, serving four as a first course. Serve in warmed bowls; it cools fast and the butter shows as it does.
American cookbooks of the 1870s treat lobster as an everyday ingredient rather than a luxury -- the New England and Maritime fisheries were landing them in such volume that canned lobster was a cheap staple, and fresh ones were widely available at fish stalls. The Home Cook Book, first published in Chicago in 1874 and compiled from contributions by named local women, is one of the earliest American charity cookbooks, and the attribution to Mrs. Robert Harris is the whole point of the format. That community-contribution style explains the recipe's brevity and its loose measurements -- it was written down by someone who already knew how the soup should look, for readers assumed to know the same. The dish itself sits in the older English tradition of milk-thickened shellfish soups, distinct from the French-influenced bisque, where the shells are pounded and the soup strained smooth.