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Lobster, Cold, Dressed
Pick the meat from the shell, mince it finely, and mix it with a little salad dressing, or with a few bread-crumbs, a little salad-oil, pepper, mustard, and vinegar, the quantities to be regulated by taste and the size of the lobster. Probable cost, from 1s. 6d. Sufficient, a medium-sized lobster for two or three persons.
A one-paragraph method that assumes the cook already has a boiled lobster on the board and knows what "salad dressing" meant in a Victorian kitchen. The gaps are worth filling in.
- Start with cooked lobsterThe recipe takes for granted a lobster already boiled and cooled, as it would have been bought. A 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly 6 oz of picked meat, which matches the stated two to three servings as a light dish.
- "Salad dressing" is not vinaigretteIn Victorian usage salad dressing generally meant a cooked or hand-whisked dressing thickened with egg yolk and mustard, closer to mayonnaise or to a boiled cream dressing, rather than a simple oil-and-vinegar mix. The alternative given in the recipe -- crumbs, oil, mustard, pepper, vinegar -- is a dressing built directly into the lobster instead.
- Bread-crumbs as a binderThe recipe does not say why the crumbs are there, but they will absorb the oil and vinegar and give the mixture body (and, incidentally, stretch it). Use fine soft white crumbs, a tablespoon or two at most, or the mixture turns pasty and the lobster flavour disappears.
- Proportions to start fromSince the original leaves quantities to taste, a workable baseline for 6 oz of meat is 2 tbsp dressing, or 1 tbsp oil to 1 tsp vinegar with 1/2 tsp mustard, seasoned after mixing. Lobster is salty on its own; taste before adding more.
- Mince, but not to pasteChop the meat rather than processing it. The recipe says only to pick the meat from the shell and is silent on the coral and the green tomalley; either can be worked into the dressing for colour and richness, or left out.
- CostThe stated 1s. 6d. is a moderate sum for a dish serving two or three, and lobster was more widely available then than the modern price suggests. It is no guide to what the dish costs now.
- Serving and keepingPile it back into the cleaned half-shells or serve on lettuce as a first course. Dress it as near to serving as possible and keep it refrigerated; dressed shellfish left at room temperature for more than a couple of hours should be discarded.
Cold dressed lobster belongs to the Victorian and Edwardian supper table, where cold shellfish, salads and moulded dishes filled out a buffet or a late evening spread without further cooking. Cassell's gives it in the barest terms because the technique was assumed knowledge. British and Irish waters supplied lobster in quantity through the nineteenth century, and the shellfish was far less of a luxury than it later became. The same picked-and-dressed treatment underlies lobster salad, lobster patties and filled shells, all of them ways of stretching one animal across several plates.