LOBSTER SOUP, OR BISQUE OF LOBSTER.
(Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book, 1884)
2 pounds lobster.
1 teaspoonful salt.
1 quart milk.
1 saltspoonful white pepper.
1 tablespoonful butter.
1/4 saltspoonful cayenne pepper.
2 tablesp. flour or cornstarch.
1 pint water.
Remove the meat of the lobster from the shell, and cut the tender pieces into quarter-inch dice. Put the ends of the claw meat and any other tough, hard parts, with the bones of the body, into one pint of cold water, and boil twenty minutes, adding more water as it boils away.
Put the coral on a piece of paper, and dry it in the oven.
Boil one quart of milk, and thicken it with one tablespoonful of butter and two of flour or cornstarch. Boil ten minutes.
Strain the water from the bones and add it to the milk. Add the salt and pepper, using more if high seasoning be desired. Rub the dried coral through a strainer, using enough to give the soup a bright pink color.
Put the green fat and lobster dice into the tureen, and strain the boiling soup over them. Serve immediately.
If you do not like so much of the lobster in the soup, chop it all very fine, boil it with the milk, and rub it through a squash or gravy strainer. Many like the additional thickening of half a cup of fine cracker crumbs.
This soup may also be varied by using one pint of stock, either chicken or veal, and one pint of milk; or by the addition of force-meat balls made in the following manner:
Cut only half of the meat into dice; chop the remainder, and pound it to a fine paste with the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, one teaspoonful of butter, a little salt, and pepper; beat one raw egg, and add enough of it to moisten the paste so that it may easily be made into balls the size of a nutmeg; let them simmer in the soup about five minutes, just enough to cook the egg.
