Lobster Salad
Put a large lobster over the fire in boiling water slightly salted; boil rapidly for about twenty minutes; when done it will be of a bright red color, and should be removed, as if boiled too long it will be tough; when cold, crack the claws, after first disjointing, twist off the head (which is used in garnishing), split the body in two lengthwise, pick out the meat in bits not too fine, saving the coral separate; cut up a large head of lettuce slightly, and place on a dish over which lay the lobster, putting the coral around the outside. For dressing, take the yolks of three eggs, beat weli, add four table-spoons salad-oil, dropping it in very slowly, beating all the time; then add a little salt, cayenne pepper, half tea-spoon mixed mustard, and two table-spoons vinegar. Pour this over the lobster, just before sending to table. - Mrs. A. Wilson, Rye, N. Y.
A straightforward boiled lobster dressed with a hand-beaten mayonnaise. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time and the raw-yolk dressing.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes will overcook anything under about two pounds. Figure 12-14 minutes for a 1.5 lb lobster and roughly 3 minutes more per additional pound, timed from the moment the water returns to a boil. The recipe's own warning that overboiling makes it tough is the point to heed.
- Colour is not donenessThe shell turns red well before the meat is set, since the pigment is released by heat almost immediately. Judge instead by the tail meat being opaque throughout, or by an internal temperature of about 135-140F at the thickest part of the tail.
- The coralThe coral is the roe, found only in females; it is dark greenish-black when raw and turns bright red-orange when cooked. If your lobster has none, the garnish is simply omitted. The soft green tomalley in the body is the hepatopancreas, commonly called the liver; it was prized in this period but is now the subject of consumption advisories in several regions because it concentrates contaminants.
- "Twist off the head"What is meant is the carapace, the hard body shell; the recipe says only that it is "used in garnishing." Skip it without loss.
- Raw-yolk dressingThis is mayonnaise made by hand and served uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs, or shell eggs from a source you trust, and keep the finished salad refrigerated; the vinegar goes in at the end and does not sterilize anything.
- Salad oilIn this period salad oil usually meant olive oil, though cottonseed oil was increasingly sold under the same name. Four tablespoons of oil to three yolks is a thin, loose dressing by modern standards -- closer to a sauce than a stiff mayonnaise. Add oil more slowly than seems necessary at the start or it will break.
- Mixed mustardMustard powder worked to a paste with water or vinegar, i.e. roughly what comes out of a jar of plain prepared mustard. Half a teaspoon of dry mustard powder works equally well and helps the emulsion hold.
- YieldOne large lobster and a head of lettuce serves four as a first course, two as a light main. Dress it at the last moment as instructed, or the lettuce collapses.
Lobster salad belongs to the late nineteenth-century American taste for cold composed dishes, helped along by rail and iced-car shipment of New England shellfish inland; a Rye, New York contributor to a book of Ohio origin published in Minneapolis suggests the range of sources the compilers drew on. Lobster was cheaper and more plentiful on the Atlantic seaboard than it is now, though by the 1870s it was no longer merely everyday food, and inland it would have been a special-occasion dish. The dressing is a plain hand-beaten mayonnaise of a type long established in French cookery, and a similar formula -- yolks, oil dropped in slowly, salt, cayenne, mustard, vinegar -- recurs in American household books of the period. The instruction to pick the meat "in bits not too fine" preserves the texture of the lobster.