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Lobster Sauce
Plunge a one pound live lobster in boiling water with teaspoon salt, and boil for twenty minutes, remove, let slightly cool off, crack the shells of tails and claws, pick out all the meat, cut it in small square pieces and keep on a plate, then cut off head. Place all the shells in a mortar with one and a half ounces butter and pound to a perfect pulp, then rub through sieve on a plate. Mix in a small saucepan one half ounce butter with an ounce flour, heat for half a minute, then pour in one and a half gills milk and half gill cream, season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne and half teaspoon grated nutmeg, mix until it comes to a boil, boil for five minutes. Add, little by little, the lobster pulp, briskly mixing while adding it. Now add the cut-up lobster, cook for five minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile, and use as required.
A classic shellfish sauce built on lobster butter — the shells are pounded with butter and sieved so their flavour and colour carry into a béchamel. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time and the nutmeg.
- The hinge: don't boil the lobster twenty minutesA one-pound lobster is cooked through in about 8 minutes of hard boiling; twenty leaves the tail fibrous and dry, and it will be cooked a second time in the sauce. Pull it as soon as the shell is fully red and the tail curls tight.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup and half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which is a sane amount of cayenne here.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon of grated nutmeg in a cup of sauce will dominate everything; a few scrapes, or 1/8 teaspoon, sits better with lobster.
- Making the lobster butterA mortar is authentic but slow. A food processor will break the shells down with the butter in a minute or two, after which pressing through a fine sieve is still essential — any shell grit that gets through ruins the texture. Some cooks warm the butter and shells gently first to draw out more colour.
- Include the coralIf the lobster is a hen and carries roe, pound it with the shells. Boiled with the lobster it will already have set bright red, and it adds more colour to the sauce than the shells alone.
- The rouxHalf an ounce butter to one ounce flour is a stiff, flour-heavy roux — roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/4 cup flour. With only a cup of liquid this gives a very thick sauce, closer to a binding for croquettes. Thin with additional milk if you want a pouring sauce.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a half to two cups: enough to sauce fish for four, or to fill vol-au-vents. It goes with poached white fish, turbot, sole, or steamed halibut, and with a fish souffle.
- ReheatingThe butter-enriched sauce will separate over direct heat. Warm it in a bain-marie or over the lowest flame, stirring, and do not return it to a hard boil once the lobster meat is in.
Alexander Filippini, longtime chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the method here is that of the French professional kitchen: beurre de homard, lobster shells pounded with butter and sieved, is the classical way of extracting the flavour and the red pigment that the meat itself does not give up. The same base underlies sauce homard, sauce cardinal and bisque. What dates the recipe is the assumption that a cook has a mortar heavy enough to reduce shell to pulp and the time to do it. It also assumes lobster cheap enough to buy for a sauce rather than as the dish itself, which along much of the American northeast coast was still broadly true when Filippini was writing.