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Souffle of Lobster
Heat one tablespoon butter in a small saucepan, add two tablespoons flour, briskly stir with a wooden spoon while cooking for one minute, add two gills milk and a gill cream; thoroughly mix and let boil for five minutes, then remove the pan to the table.
Split in two and crack the claws of two live lobsters of one pound each. Pick out all meat from the shells and body, place it in a mortar and pound to a puree, then add three egg yolks to the sauce; briskly whisk it, then gradually add the same to the lobster in the mortar, mixing unceasingly while adding it. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon of grated nutmeg; lightly mix. Press the puree through a sieve into a large bowl. Beat up the white of the three eggs to a stiff froth and gently mix it with the preparation. Place the puree into a lightly buttered souffle dish, and set in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove and serve.
A late-Victorian restaurant soufflé written in Delmonico-era shorthand, with liquid measured in gills and seasoning in saltspoons. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the quantities need translating before you start.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk and a gill cream come to 1 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: the cayenne is about 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg about 1/4 teaspoon.
- Moderate ovenIn books of this period "moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty-five minutes assumes a shallow dish; a deeper one will need longer, and because the lobster goes in raw the soufflé should be baked through rather than pulled while the centre is still loose.
- The raw lobsterAs written the meat goes into the mortar uncooked and is cooked only by the baking. Raw lobster is difficult to extract cleanly from the shell, and a brief parboil of two or three minutes loosens the meat and costs the finished soufflé nothing. Either way the soufflé itself must be baked through, not served soft in the middle.
- Mortar to processorA food processor does the pounding in seconds. Pulse rather than run it continuously, or the meat pastes out and loses texture, and reserve a little chopped claw meat to fold in whole if you want something to bite on.
- Do not skip the sievePressing the puree through a sieve is the step that separates this from a coarse pudding. Lobster carries fine membrane and cartilage that no blade fully breaks down, and the sieve is what gives the soufflé its smoothness.
- Tempering the yolksThe yolks go into the hot sauce off the heat and are whisked hard, then the sauce is added to the lobster gradually. Add it in a thin stream while mixing without stopping, exactly as directed, so the mixture stays smooth.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to a stiff but not dry froth and fold in a third first to slacken the heavy lobster base, then the rest. Get it into the buttered dish and into the oven immediately.
- YieldTwo 1-lb lobsters and three eggs give four generous first-course portions, or two as a light main dish. Serve it the moment it leaves the oven.
Soufflés of shellfish were a fixture of American hotel and club cookery from the 1880s onward, and this one has the texture of a kitchen text adapted for domestic readers: liquid in gills, seasoning in saltspoons, a wooden spoon specified for the roux, and the brisk instruction to "remove the pan to the table" rather than to a trivet or a cooling rack. Lobster was cheap enough in the Northeast through the nineteenth century to be treated as everyday food, but by the time books like this were compiled it had moved decisively upmarket, and a dish that turned two whole one-pound lobsters into four spoonfuls of froth was a statement about the household as much as about dinner. The insistence on live lobsters is practical rather than showy: buying the animal alive was one of the surer guarantees of freshness.