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Souffle of Lobster
(Nice.) Blend 1 ounce of butter with 2 ounces of flour; add 1 gill of milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and 1/2 pound of cooked and chopped lobster, then the yolks of 3 eggs, 6 oysters, chopped fine, a gill of cream, whipped stiff, and the beaten whites of 3 eggs. Pour into a buttered mould, steam like a custard for 1/2 an hour, turn out carefully and cover with a white sauce, containing mushrooms.
This is a steamed lobster mousseline rather than a true risen soufflé — egg whites lighten it, but the mould sets it like a custard. Treat it as a hot fish pudding and it behaves predictably.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: 1/2 cup by US measure, 5 fl oz if the book is following imperial. So roughly 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream (measured before whipping). Both gills together with 1 oz butter and 2 oz flour give a very stiff base, which is what holds the lobster in suspension.
- The base is a panada, not a rouxTwice as much flour as butter is deliberate. Cook the butter and flour together a minute or two, add the milk, and stir over heat until the paste pulls away from the pan in a mass; cool it to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble.
- Fold, do not stirThe whipped cream and the beaten whites go in last and separately. Slacken the heavy base with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in with a spatula. Overworking here is the difference between light and rubbery.
- The oystersSix shucked oysters, chopped fine, add liquor and sweetness. They finish cooking inside the mould in the half hour of steaming, which is ample; whole oysters in a mixture like this would tighten and weep.
- Steaming "like a custard"Butter a 1-quart mould, cover it with buttered parchment or foil, and set it in a pan of barely simmering water reaching halfway up the sides, or in a covered steamer. Water that boils hard will inflate and then collapse the mixture.
- DonenessHalf an hour suits a 1-quart mould; a smaller, deeper one may want 40 minutes. It is done when the centre is just set and a skewer comes out clean. Let it stand five minutes off the heat before unmoulding, or it will crack.
- LobsterHalf a pound of picked cooked meat means a lobster of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, since only a fifth to a quarter of the live weight is meat. Chop, do not pur , so they stay visible in the slice; the recipe adds the lobster to the base before the yolks go in.
- The sauceA plain béchamel with sliced mushrooms sweated in butter, thinned to coating consistency. Lobster shells simmered in the milk for ten minutes and strained out make it considerably better.
- YieldFour as a first course, two or three as a light main. It must go to table immediately; reheated, it turns dense.
The bracketed "(Nice.)" tags the dish with a place, a habit of travel-gathered collections in which recipes are labelled with the town or country they were picked up in. Steamed fish and shellfish moulds of this kind were common in French professional practice, sitting between the quenelle and the souffl e: with whites so it could be turned out whole and sauced. The Riviera attribution may reflect the ingredients rather than the method -- lobster, oysters and mushrooms under a white sauce is standard Paris kitchen grammar, and a dish labelled with a resort town in a book of this sort may record what a travelling diner was served at a hotel table rather than anything cooked locally.