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Lobster A La Tartare
If you procure fresh lobsters, boil fifteen or twenty minutes. Cut into small square pieces and place in a bowl. Make half a pint of tartare sauce and pour over the lobster. Garnish the dish with lettuce leaves. Do not mix until about ready to serve. -Mrs. L.. B., Canada.
A cold lobster salad dressed at the last moment, from a period when "tartare" meant a mayonnaise stiff with capers and pickle rather than anything from a bottle. Two things need translating: the boiling time and the sauce.
- Boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes will overcook a modern market lobster. A 1 to 1 1/4 lb hard-shell lobster needs roughly 8-10 minutes at a rolling boil, a 2 lb bird closer to 15; the meat should be opaque and firm, not stringy. Longer times in older books may reflect larger lobsters, or simply a different idea of doneness.
- Chill before cuttingCool the boiled lobster completely before you cut it into squares. Warm meat sheds liquid into the sauce and the salad slackens within minutes.
- Half a pint of sauceThat is one US cup, which is generous for a single lobster and about right for two. A period tartare sauce is mayonnaise with finely chopped capers, gherkins or pickle, parsley and shallot or onion, sometimes sharpened with a little tarragon vinegar or mustard.
- Homemade mayonnaiseThe base would have been made by hand with raw yolk. If you make your own and are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs, or start from a commercial mayonnaise and add the pickle and herbs yourself.
- The hinge: dress at the last minuteThe closing instruction is the whole point of the recipe. Lobster held in mayonnaise weeps salt water, thins the sauce and turns the meat woolly. Keep the meat and the sauce separately chilled and combine them as the plates go out.
- The lettuceLeaves here are a cup or a bed, not a tossed salad. Whole crisp leaves of iceberg, romaine heart or butterhead line the bowl; nothing is dressed but the lobster itself.
- YieldOne 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly 6 oz of picked meat, enough for two as a first course. Figure a lobster apiece for a lunch main.
Sauce tartare appears in French cookery by the mid-nineteenth century as a mayonnaise finished with mustard, herbs and chopped pickles, and its name is usually traced to the older culinary habit of labelling anything sharp or coarsely seasoned "a la tartare" after the Tartars, with no real connection to the steppe. It travelled to English and American kitchens alongside fried fish, and cold shellfish was another natural partner. Compiled household books of this kind were commonly assembled from readers' and subscribers' contributions; here the contributor is identified only by initials and by country, as "Mrs. L. B., Canada."