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Lobster Soup (Paris Boil fine hen lobster)
(Paris.) Boil 1 fine hen lobster weighing 2 pounds. Pick and chop the meat and pound the coral with 1 ounce of butter and rub it through a sieve. Add to the meat 2 quarts of white stock, 1 onion, parsley, thyme, and the rind of a lemon. Cook 1/2 hour, add a blending of flour and butter, and rub it through a sieve. Season it with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, add 1/2 pint of whipped cream, and serve, giving a little cream to each person.
A classic French lobster velouté, written for a cook who already knows how to make white stock and pass a soup through a sieve. Two details carry the dish: the coral butter, and the fact that the cream goes in off the heat.
- The hinge: cream at the endThe whipped cream is not cooked into the soup; it goes in at the very end, and the recipe adds that a little cream is given to each person. The text does not actually say to take the pan off the heat, but keeping it off the boil is sensible, since boiled whipped cream collapses and the delicacy of the lobster is lost.
- Hen lobster and coralA hen is a female lobster, wanted here for the coral (the roe), which is black-green when raw and turns scarlet on cooking. Ask a fishmonger for a female; if you get a male, you will have no coral and the soup will be pale ivory rather than pink. A teaspoon of tomato paste cooked in the butter gives colour but not the same flavour.
- Coral butterPounding 1 oz (2 tablespoons) butter with the coral and sieving it makes a compound butter that both colours and thickens. A small food processor or a fine mesh strainer with the back of a ladle does the pounding work; the sieving is worth doing, as the coral is granular even after the lobster has been boiled.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock, unbrowned and only lightly salted. Two quarts is 8 cups. The lobster shells, cracked and simmered in the stock for 20 minutes before straining, will improve it considerably and are the one thing a modern cook would add.
- "A blending of flour and butter"Beurre manié: equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked in bit by bit. For 2 quarts, start with 2 tablespoons of each and add more if you want it thicker. Simmer two or three minutes afterwards so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Half pint of creamOne cup, whipped to soft peaks, not stiff. The seasoning check should happen before it goes in, since the cream mutes salt.
- TimingsAs written, the stock goes onto the picked meat with the aromatics and the whole cooks half an hour before being sieved. A modern cook may prefer to hold back some of the chopped meat and drop it into the finished soup off the heat, since already-cooked lobster toughens with long simmering.
- Lemon and nutmegPared rind only, no white pith; it will be caught with the onion and herbs at the final sieving. Nutmeg here means a few scrapes, not a measured pinch -- a background note rather than a flavour you should be able to name.
- YieldTwo quarts of finished soup serves 8 as a first course, 5 or 6 as a main.
The parenthetical "(Paris.)" signals a French treatment: this is a *bisque* in the nineteenth-century sense, thickened with coral and a flour-and-butter paste and finished with cream. The word bisque is generally traced to the Bay of Biscay, though the etymology has never been settled; earlier English and French uses attached it to rich potées of pigeon or crayfish rather than lobster in particular. Books of this kind, gathered by American travellers who ate their way through Europe, often carry a Paris attribution as a mark of technique. What dates the dish most is the coral, which is the hardest part of the recipe for a modern cook to source, since a fishmonger cannot promise a hen with roe.