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Lobster Soup (London Cut into dice the meat)
(London.) Cut into dice the meat of a boiled lobster, fry it with 1 carrot, 1 onion, 4 pieces of celery, all sliced, parsley, thyme, and the rind of a lemon, in 2 ounces of butter. Add 6 ounces of rice flour, or cooked rice rubbed to a paste, 3 pints of good stock, and the meat and pounded coral. Cook 1/2 hour, press through a sieve, add 1 glass of sherry, some of the meat in pieces, and made into forcemeat balls with bread, herbs, eggs, and poached in a little broth.
A Victorian bisque in the older English manner, thickened with rice rather than cream and finished with sherry and forcemeat balls. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the shape of the dish, so a few things need filling in.
- Lobster size and yieldThree pints of stock makes a soup for roughly six, which suggests a good-sized boiled lobster or two smaller ones; the recipe does not say. Reserve part of the picked meat before frying, since the recipe calls for some to go into the finished soup in pieces and some into the forcemeat balls.
- The coralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red when cooked. It is the colouring and much of the flavour of the dish. If your lobster has none, the soup will be pale and thinner-tasting; a spoonful of tomato paste is the usual modern substitute for colour, though not for flavour.
- Rice flourRice flour is still sold, often as a gluten-free baking flour, and behaves as written. Six ounces is roughly a cup, give or take, and gives a soup with real body. The alternative given — cooked rice worked to a paste — relies on the sieve to smooth it out.
- Lemon rindPared rind only, no white pith, and fish it out before sieving. A vegetable peeler takes off exactly the right thickness.
- A glass of sherryPeriod English cookery books usually reckon a wine glass at about 2 fl oz, though usage varied; a scant quarter cup is a safe reading. Use a dry amontillado or fino; cream sherry will make the soup cloying. Add it off the heat so the aroma survives.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or stick blender does the work in seconds, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards. Fragments of lobster shell find their way into the pot no matter how carefully you pick the meat.
- Forcemeat ballsBind chopped lobster with fresh breadcrumbs, chopped parsley and thyme, and enough beaten egg to hold; the mixture should be stiff, not wet. Roll into marbles and poach in simmering broth — never a rolling boil — for three or four minutes, until they float and firm up. Drop them into the bowls, not the pot, or they break up.
- Don't overcook the reserved meatThe lobster is already cooked. The half-hour simmer is for the stock and the aromatics; the pieces stirred in at the end need only to warm through, or they turn to rubber.
This is a London version of what was often called simply lobster soup, the ancestor of the bisque now served in cream-thickened form. The thickening here is rice or rice flour — cream-and-butter finishes came into general use later, largely through French restaurant cooking — and the coral does the colouring work that paprika and tomato took over in the twentieth century. Forcemeat balls poached separately and dropped into the tureen were standard garnish for grand soups of the period. The book collects dishes by city, and this one is attributed to London.