French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [186]
MAYONNAISE DE HOMARD OU DE LANGOUSTE
LOBSTER OR CRAWFISH MAYONNAISE
This is really a way of making your lobster go rather further than it normally would; it can be an excellent dish but rather overwhelming and is best, perhaps, served in small quantities as a first course rather than as a main dish.
It is made in the same way as any mayonnaise de poisson (page 288), with the lobster flesh cut into neat escalopes, the creamy parts rubbed through a sieve into the mayonnaise, the whole piled up in a pyramid in a shallow dish and the coral, if any, sprinkled over the top as a garnish. Crisp little lettuce hearts should be arranged round the base of the pyramid. The tails of langoustines or Dublin Bay prawns, freshly boiled (personally I do not think frozen ones worth buying) can be served in the same way.
HOMARD COURCHAMPS
While looking up references to the homard à l’américaine, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to know how the lobster and the langouste were served by French cooks before the américaine dish became so fashionable. Among the rather scarce earlier recipes was a spit-roasted one with truffles and champagne in the sauce, another with the juice of a Seville orange squeezed over it; several cold lobster dishes with varying forms of ravigote or rémoulade sauce, and one which appears, with slight variations, in three well-known cookery books: first in the Dictionnaire Général de la Cuisine Française, 1866, originally published in 1834 under the title Néo-Physiologie du Goût; in Dumas the Elder’s Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, 1873; and in the 366 Menus de Baron Brisse, 1875 edition (first published 1867) which also, incidentally, contains a recipe for homards à la bordelaise which is suspiciously like our friend the américaine again. The Baron Brisse calls the dish homard au court-bouillon. Neither of the other authors provides it with a name, and I have called it after the Comte de Courchamps, author of the Néo-Physiologie du Goût. Here is the recipe.
The lobster is boiled in the usual way but with the addition of a ‘full goblet’ of Madeira wine, a large lump of butter, a bunch of parsley, a red pepper and the white part of 2 or 3 leeks to the salted water, and the lobster is left to cool in its broth.
The sauce is made as follows: ‘all the creamy parts, and the red coral if it is a hen lobster, are mixed with fruity olive oil, a full spoonful of good mustard, 10 to 12 drops of Chinese soy sauce, a good pinch of chopped fines herbes, 2 crushed shallots, a fair quantity of mignonette pepper and finally a half-glass of anisette de Bordeaux, or simply of aniseed ratafia. When all these ingredients are well amalgamated, you add the juice of 2 or 3 lemons according to the size of the lobster and you serve the sauce “à proximité de ce plat d’entremets.” ’
The recipe rather implies that the flesh of the lobster is served on a dish without the shell, for the instructions are to ‘detach all the white flesh with the end of a sharpened quill.’
It sounds, to say the least, outlandish, but I never believe in condemning recipes simply because they sound unorthodox or because they happen to have escaped the attention of the great professional masters of the past. (The three authors mentioned above were all amateurs.)
A certain degree of curiosity is surely necessary to a cook. And curiosity nagged at me until I finally went out and bought a bottle of Chinese soy sauce, some Marie Brizard anisette liqueur and a nice, freshly-boiled hen lobster. It would have to do without its bath of Madeira, butter and herbs, for as none of the cooking liquid is used for the sauce this really does seem rather wasteful, although of course it should make the basis of a pretty high-class soup.
To make the sauce I used, apart from the exact quantities of shallot, soy and the cream and coral from the lobster as specified, a teaspoon of chopped tarragon and parsley, 1 of yellow Dijon mustard, not much more than 2 teaspoons of anisette, 4 tablespoons