Home › The World's Kitchen › Lobster, Hollandaise Vert-Pre
Lobster, Hollandaise Vert-Pre
Plunge three one-pound live lobsters in a gallon of boiling water with a tablespoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, half gill vinegar, and boil for twenty minutes. Lift up, thoroughly drain, detach claws from bodies and lightly crack, split bodies in two lengthwise, remove gravel pouch from heads and dress on a dish. Decorate all around with parsley greens and serve with a Hollandaise vert-pre separately.
A plain boiled lobster presented cold or warm with a green hollandaise alongside. The only real problem is the boiling time, which belongs to an era of much larger lobsters.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes will turn one-pound lobsters stringy and dry. A one-pound lobster needs about 8 minutes from the return to a full boil, a pound and a half about 10 to 12.
- Half a gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill is 2 fl oz, or about 4 tablespoons — a modest acidulation of a gallon of water, not a pickling brine.
- Salt the water properlyOne tablespoon of salt per gallon is light seasoning by modern standards; a more heavily salted pot (about 1/4 cup per gallon) seasons the meat as it cooks.
- The gravel pouchThis is the stomach sac behind the eyes. Remove it along with the dark intestinal tract running the length of the tail. The green tomalley and any red coral are edible and often stirred into the sauce.
- Hollandaise vert-préVert-pré means "green meadow." Make a standard hollandaise and finish it with a purée or fine chiffonade of blanched spinach, parsley, chervil and tarragon, squeezed dry so the sauce is coloured rather than thinned. Hold it warm rather than hot — much above about 150F it is liable to break.
- Split bodies neatlyWork on a board with the point of a heavy knife through the head first, then cut back through the tail. Drain the split halves cut side down for a minute so the sauce is not diluted on the plate.
- YieldThree one-pound lobsters serve three as a main course, or six as a first course. Allow roughly 1/4 cup of sauce per person.
Vert-pré is one of the standard garnish names of the classical French repertoire, applied to anything given a green finish — watercress and straw potatoes with a grilled steak, or, as here, a hollandaise tinted with blanched herbs. Its appearance beside a plainly boiled American lobster is characteristic of the French-named restaurant cooking this book records, in which classical sauce names were attached to whatever the local market supplied best.