Lobster Soup
Boil one large lobster and extract the meat, setting aside the coral in a cool place. Cut up the meat found in the claws. Rub the yolks of the hard boiled eggs to a paste with a teaspoonful of butter. Pound and rub the claw meat in the same manner, and mix with the yolks. Beat up a raw egg, and stir into the paste; season with pepper and salt; make into force-meat balls, and set away with the coral to cool and harden. Have two quarts of veal or chicken broth well heated, put in the rest of the lobster meat cut in square bits. Boil fifteen minutes, which time employ in pounding the coral in an earthenware bowl, rubbing it into a fine, even paste, with the addition of a few spoonfuls of the broth, gradually worked in until it is about the consistency of boiled starch. Stir very carefully into the hot soup, which should, in the process, blush into a roseate hue. Lastly, drop in the force-meat balls, after which do not stir, least they should break. Simmer a few minutes to cook the raw egg, but if allowed to boil, the soup will darken. Crab soup may be made in the same way, excepting the coralline process, crabs being destitute of that dainty.
A Victorian bisque in structure if not in name: lobster meat in a light meat stock, thickened and coloured with the coral. Two details govern the result — the soup must never boil once the coral goes in, and the lobster meat should not spend fifteen minutes in it.
- The coralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and turning coral-red when cooked. Only hen lobsters carry it, so ask the fishmonger for a female if you want the roseate colour the recipe promises. The soft green tomalley (liver) is not the same thing and will muddy rather than redden the broth.
- How many eggsThe recipe says "the yolks of the hard boiled eggs" without ever having named them — a printer's or author's slip. Two yolks to the claw meat of one large lobster makes a workable forcemeat; three if the lobster is over two pounds.
- "One large lobster"Read that as 1.5 to 2 lb live weight, which yields roughly 1 to 1.5 cups of picked meat. That is thin for two quarts of broth by modern expectations; a second lobster, or holding the broth to six cups, gives a better ratio.
- Do not boil after the coral goes inThis is the hinge. The coral paste and the egg in the forcemeat both curdle and darken above a simmer, exactly as the text warns. Keep the pot at a bare tremble, around 180F, from the moment the coral is stirred in.
- Fifteen minutes is too longAlready-cooked lobster meat needs only to heat through — two or three minutes. Simmer the broth alone for the fifteen minutes if you want it reduced and seasoned, then add the meat at the end with the coral.
- Forcemeat ballsRoll them small, about the size of a hazelnut, and chill them firm before they go in. They hold together better if poached separately in a little of the broth and lifted into the tureen, rather than dropped into the finished soup where they can break and cloud it.
- BrothTwo quarts of veal or chicken stock — unsalted or lightly salted, since it will reduce. A good shellfish stock made from the lobster shells is closer to what a modern kitchen would use and costs nothing extra.
- YieldSix to eight cups, serving six as a first course.
Lobster soup of this kind sits alongside the older English "lobster pottage" and the French bisque, which became increasingly common on American menus around the turn of the twentieth century. Notable here is the use of veal or chicken broth as the base rather than a stock made from the shells, an approach found in much Victorian cookery though by no means universal. The coral was prized out of proportion to its quantity: period cookbooks use it pounded with butter as "lobster butter" or as a colouring paste, and the author bothers to note that crabs are "destitute of that dainty." The forcemeat balls, made from claw meat bound with egg, serve as garnish, and the same technique appears in period turtle and mock-turtle soups.