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Barquettes, Cardinal
Roll out on a lightly floured table a quarter pound pie paste to about one-sixth inch in thickness. Have six individual, oval, lightly buttered moulds and carefully line with paste, press down at bottom, all around edges, trim off, fill up with dried beans and set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, take out beans, wipe moulds, and keep till required. Plunge two one-and-a-half-pound live lobsters in a gallon boiling water with a tablespoon salt, boil for twenty minutes, take up and let slightly cool off. Crack shells from claws and tail, pick out meat and cut it in small square pieces, keeping shells. Place a pint tomato sauce in a saucepan, reduce on fire to two gills and add six sliced canned mushrooms. Mix in little by little a lobster butter, sharply whisking while adding, then add lobster with two saltspoons each salt and cayenne. Gently mix, divide preparation in the six barquettes, sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over and set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, lift barquettes from moulds, dress on hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley, six quarters lemon, and serve.
A lobster gratin served in six little pastry boats. The original assumes you know how to make lobster butter and gives no oven temperature, so those are the two gaps to fill before starting.
- Lobster butterThe recipe calls for it without explaining it, which is why the shells are kept. Pound or blitz the cracked shells with an equal weight of softened butter, warm gently until the butter turns coral, then strain through muslin and chill; roughly 4 oz butter for two lobsters, adjusting to how much shell you have. It carries most of the colour, and that red is what the name Cardinal refers to.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Blind-bake the lined moulds at 400F for the stated ten minutes, and give the filled, cheese-topped barquettes the same heat for the final ten so the tops colour without the pastry darkening further.
- Boiling the lobstersTwenty minutes at 1½ lb each is long by current practice and leaves the tail meat firm and stringy. Ten to twelve minutes from the return to the boil is enough, and the meat is going into a hot sauce afterwards.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a pint of tomato sauce reduces to one cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon: half a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of cayenne, which is genuinely hot. Add the cayenne in stages and taste.
- The pastry quantityA quarter pound of pie paste is tight for six oval moulds at one-sixth inch, depending how large your moulds are. If they are on the big side, make half a pound and accept the trimmings.
- Blind-bakingLine the pastry with paper before the dried beans; the original omits it, and beans dropped straight onto raw paste stick and pit the surface. Ten minutes sets the shell but leaves it pale, which is correct here since it bakes again.
- Finishing the sauceWhisk the lobster butter in off the direct heat, a small piece at a time, as you would mount any butter sauce. If the reduced tomato is boiling it will split and the coral colour goes muddy.
- Yield and serviceSix barquettes, one each as a first course. A folded napkin on the platter is the conventional dressing for such items and keeps them from sliding.
Barquette is simply French for a little boat, the shape of the oval mould, and the pastry case has been standard garnish-work in professional kitchens since the nineteenth century. Cardinal in classical French cookery signals the deep red of a cardinal's robes, and by convention it means lobster: a cardinal sauce is built on lobster butter and its coral, and dishes so named almost always involve lobster somewhere. Alexander Filippini, whose International Cook Book gathers hundreds of these short professional formulas, wrote from decades at Delmonico's in New York.