961—Homard à la Russe

Proceed exactly as above with regard to the cooking of the lobster, the extraction of the meat, and the cutting of it into slices. Coat the slices with mayonnaise sauce combined with melted jelly; or, better still, with a white fish chaud-froid sauce combined with the lobster’s creamy parts rubbed through a sieve.

Decorate each slice with a bit of coral and two little chervil leaves; coat them again and again with cold melted aspic, and put them aside in the cool. “No. 916, Another Method of Preparing Aspics de Filets de Soles” ten dariole-moulds, and decorate the bottom of each with a slice of truffle. Also prepare ten hard-boiled eggs.

Prepare a Salade Russe (without meat); add to this the remains of the lobster meat cut into dice, and thicken with mayonnaise and melted aspic, mixed. With this thickened salad fill the dariole-moulds, and leave to set in the cool.

Dishing.—Set the lobster on a cushion, after the manner of the preceding recipe. Trim the slices, and lay them, as before, on the lobster’s back, taking care to graduate their sizes. Surround the lobster with the small moulded salads, and alternate these with the hard-boiled eggs. The latter should be cut in two at a point one-third of their height above their base; their yolks should be removed, the space filled with caviare moulded to the form of a pyramid, and, this done, the eggs should be set upright.

Border the dish with roundels of very clear fish jelly, stamped out by a fancy-cutter, and lay a bit of truffle upon each.

N.B.—(1) The moulds of salad must, of course, be dipped in hot water before being turned out.

(2) The lobster may also be served “à la Néva,” “à la Moscovite,” “à la Sibérienne,” &c., but these preparations are only minor forms of “Homard à la Russe” under different names.

Changes may be effected in the preparation by altering the constituents of the salad and its dishing. It may, for instance, be made in small cucumber or beetroot No. 314, Barquettes, while the caviare, instead of being laid in hard-boiled eggs, may be served in little pleated cases.

As these preparations, however, are based neither on fixed principles nor on classical rules, I shall refrain from giving them.