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Lobster Salad (Meat of two lobsters)
The meat of two lobsters, three-quarters the same bulk of celery, yolks of five eggs, two teaspoonfuls of mustard, one teaspoonful pepper, half teaspoonful salt, one-third cupful vinegar. One small bottle of sweet oil, stirred gradually into the egg, a few drops at a time. After it begins to thicken, add the other ingredients, well mixed in the vinegar.
This is a mayonnaise built from scratch with the salad's seasonings stirred into the vinegar rather than added separately. Everything depends on the emulsion.
- The hinge: add the oil a few drops at a timeFive yolks will carry a great deal of oil, but only if it goes in slowly enough to break into droplets. Pour faster than a trickle at the start and the sauce will separate; once it has visibly thickened you can increase to a thin stream.
- "One small bottle of sweet oil"Sweet oil is olive oil. The bottle is not a fixed measure, so read it as an unspecified amount added by eye — perhaps around a cup — and stop when the sauce is as thick as you want it rather than when the bottle is empty.
- Mustard means dry mustardTwo teaspoons of prepared mustard would do nothing here. This is powdered mustard, which also helps stabilise the emulsion.
- Quantities in bulk, not weightTwo 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb lobsters yield somewhere around three-quarters of a pound of picked meat, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups cut up. Three-quarters that bulk of celery is about 2 cups, diced fine. The whole makes a salad for six to eight.
- Everything at room temperatureCold yolks and cold oil emulsify badly. If the sauce breaks, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it a spoonful at a time.
- Raw yolksThe sauce is never cooked. Use very fresh eggs, or pasteurised yolks if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the finished salad refrigerated.
- Dress it lateFold the mayonnaise through the lobster and celery shortly before serving. Celery weeps salt water within an hour or two and thins the dressing.
- ServingThe recipe gives no direction for serving. Lettuce or the emptied shells are the usual period presentation. Chill the salad but not to the point of dulling the lobster.
Lobster salad was a fixture of American cold suppers and buffet tables through the nineteenth century, and its spread owes as much to canning and rail transport as to fresh shellfish: lobster was cheap, abundant along the New England coast, and tinned in quantity, which put it on menus far inland. Recipes of this era commonly pair it with celery, valued for its crunch and its keeping quality in winter, and with a hand-beaten mayonnaise of oil and raw yolk eing the standstandard nineteenth-century grocer's term for edible olive oil, as distinguished from lamp and machine oils. That the recipe gives no instruction for the mayonnaise beyond "stirred gradually into the egg, a few drops at a time" suggests something about the expected reader: making a boiled or plain dressing by hand was, it seems fair to infer, assumed knowledge, and the salad chapters of books like this one appear to treat it as shorthand.