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Lobster Salad (Boil two lobsters When)
Boil two lobsters. When perfectly cold take out the meat, cut in small squares and put in a cold place until wanted. Make half a pint of mayonnaise dressing, mix well with the lobster and put in the dish. Garnish the dish with lettuce leaves. Mash coral fine and sprinkle over the whole
A late-Victorian composed salad that depends entirely on the quality of two things: the lobster and the mayonnaise. The original assumes you know how to cook a lobster and how to make dressing by hand, so the useful work here is in the measurements and the timing.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseIn American measure that is one cup (an imperial half pint would be 10 fl oz). Two lobsters of about 1 1/4 lb each should give somewhere near 2 cups of picked meat, so the dressing-to-meat ratio is generous by modern taste — start with half and add the rest as needed.
- Cook it brieflyA 1 1/4 lb lobster needs about 8 minutes at a hard boil in well-salted water, adding a minute or two per additional half pound. Older books often say 20 to 30 minutes, which gives cottony, stringy meat.
- "When perfectly cold"This is the hinge. Warm meat breaks down mayonnaise and makes the salad greasy, so cool the lobsters fully before picking, and keep the picked meat refrigerated until the moment of dressing.
- CoralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green to near-black and gelatinous when raw and bright scarlet once cooked. Not every lobster has any, so the garnish is optional. The green tomalley is the liver-pancreas, edible but a known accumulator of contaminants; many advisories now suggest limiting it.
- The mayonnaiseA period dressing is raw yolk, oil, vinegar or lemon, mustard and salt, beaten by hand. If you are making it from scratch for a dish that will never be cooked, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salad cold and eat it the same day.
- Garnish and yield'Garnish with lettuce leaves' most likely means whole crisp leaves lining or ringing the dish rather than shredded greens underneath, though the recipe does not say. As written it would probably serve about four as a first course, or two or three as lunch.
Lobster salad was a fixture of American hotel and club menus from the 1870s onward, and its appearance in a general household book like this one marks how far the ice trade and rail shipping had pushed shellfish inland — lobster that once spoiled within a day of the wharf could reach a city kitchen packed in ice. The dish belongs to the age of the cold buffet and the "collation," where composed salads bound with mayonnaise were arranged for the eye as much as the palate, hence the instruction to garnish and to dust the whole with sieved coral for color. Mayonnaise itself was still made fresh at home in this period; jarred versions appeared commercially on a small scale from the mid-1900s and are generally said to have become widely distributed in the United States only in the 1910s, which is why the recipe treats a half pint of dressing as something the cook simply produces rather than buys.