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Mousse of Lobster
Crack the shells from two live fresh lobsters of two pounds each, then pick out all the meat and pound it in a mortar to a pulp, then rub it through a sieve into a bowl. Place in a small saucepan one gill white wine, one gill water and half ounce butter, then let it come to a boil, strew in four ounces sifted flour and sharply mix with the spatula for two minutes. Remove and place it in the mortar, then add the lobster pulp. Season with light teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Add one by one three egg yolks, and sharply pound while adding them. Beat up the whites of the three eggs to a stiff froth and add to the mortar with gill of thick cream, gently mix with spatula until well amalgamated. Lightly butter a plain quart pudding mould. Sprinkle a very little finely chopped truffle at the bottom, drop in the force, place the mould in a pan, pour in hot water up to half the height of the mould, set in the oven thirty minutes or until thoroughly firm. Remove, unmould on a hot dish. Pour cream sauce around and serve.
This is classic hotel forcemeat work: a flour panade, pounded shellfish, eggs, cream, baked in a water bath. The proportions are sound but the vocabulary and the equipment are not modern.
- The hinge: keep it cold, keep it smoothEverything after the panade depends on the mixture staying cold and fully emulsified. Chill the panade and the lobster pulp before combining, and fold the whipped whites and cream in gently — an overworked or warm mixture will weep butter and water in the mould.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon, which is assertive; the nutmeg is a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Four ounces of flour is a weightWeigh it — roughly 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons. With a full half-pint of liquid to four ounces of flour the panade is thick rather than very stiff, and it may not pull cleanly away from the pan in a single mass after the two minutes of beating.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A bain-marie custard of this kind wants 325-350F; the water in the pan should stay just below a simmer, never bubbling, or the mousse will souffle up and then collapse.
- Picking raw lobsterTwo live 2-lb lobsters yield somewhere between three-quarters of a pound and a pound of raw meat, and prising it out of the shell raw is slow work. Many cooks now blanch the lobsters 2-3 minutes to loosen the meat, which costs a little tenderness but nothing in the finished mousse, since it is fully cooked anyway.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does in ninety seconds what the mortar did in twenty minutes. Puree the lobster, then still pass it through a fine sieve or tamis — the shell fragments and connective tissue the sieve catches are the difference between a mousse and a grainy loaf.
- "The force"Forcemeat, the finished mixture. Fill the buttered quart mould no more than three-quarters full and rap it on the counter to settle out air pockets.
- Doneness and yieldThirty minutes is a minimum for a quart mould; test with a skewer, which should come out clean, or take it to about 160F at the centre. Rest it five minutes before unmoulding. It serves six as a first course, four as a main.
- The cream sauceThe book assumes you know it: a bechamel finished with cream, and in this context sometimes enriched with the reserved lobster shells or a spoonful of lobster butter.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects the grand-restaurant repertoire of that moment, when the French mousse and mousseline — a pounded forcemeat lightened with egg white and cream, set in a mould in a water bath — had become a familiar way to serve shellfish at a formal dinner. The technique descends from the older quenelle, where a panade of flour or bread bound pounded fish or veal; what marks the turn of the century is the addition of whipped cream and beaten whites to make the thing light rather than merely fine. The truffle scattered in the bottom of the mould is pure period signalling: unmoulded, it becomes the dark decorative crown of an otherwise pale dome. Filippini writes for a kitchen with a mortar, a tamis and a brigade to work them, which is why the instructions assume so much and explain so little.