Round the Table

Ingredients

• one tablespoonful of flour
• a small piece of butter in a saucepan
• white pepper
• salt

Directions

1. ON SOME ANCIENT AND MODERN

2. Lobsters are accounted by many people to be highly indigestible, and I dare say not without cause ; but there are ways of cooking lobsters, which do away with that drawback, and none so palatable, I think, as the one I am about to describe, which consists in making them into soup. By this I do not mean the preparation of a lobster broth, but of a thick soup, to make which some very good stock or meat broth is to be used. The modus operandi is as follows :

3. Pick all the meat from a lobster, and pound it in a mortar, with an almost equal quantity of butter, until you obtain a fine orange-coloured pulp. This you flavour with white pepper, salt, and grated nut- meg, according to your taste; you then melt a small piece of butter in a saucepan, and mis up with it about one tablespoonful of flour; with this you amalgamate your lobster paste ; on the other hand, you take a quantity of bread crumbs equal to that of your lobster paste, and soak them in a good allowance of stock ; then you mix them gradually with the lobster paste in the saucepan, adding more stock until you get your soup a little thinner than the consistency you wish it to be when sent up to table. You now put it out he fire, and keep stirring it until it boils and thickens, when you take it off the fire, and let it stand for a while to allow the superfluous fat to come to the surface. Having •carefully removed all the fat, you strain the soup through a fine hair sieve, and put it by until it is wanted, when