Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lobster, Mayonnaise Of
Lobster, Mayonnaise Of
Take out the meat of a freshly-boiled hen lobster, and cut it into small neat squares. Trim and wash two large fresh lettuces, or any other salad, taking great care that they are quite dry before being used. Cut or tear these into neat pieces, and arrange a layer of them at the bottom of a large dish, place several pieces of lobster upon them, and repeat until the materials are finished. Just before serving pour over them a sauce made as follows. Beat the yolks of two raw eggs for two or three minutes, until they begin to feel thick, add, by drops at first, ten table-spoonfuls of best salad-oil, and four of tarragon vinegar. The mixture should be as thick and smooth as cream. The secret of making a mayonnaise is to add the liquid gradually, and to beat well between every addition. Season the sauce with half a teaspoonful of dry mustard, half a salt-spoonful of salt, and half a salt-spoonful of white pepper. Cover the salad with the liquid. At the last moment, sprinkle over it the lobster coral, which has been powdered and well sifted, and garnish the dish with sliced beetroot and hard-boiled eggs. Time, an hour to prepare. Probable cost of lobster, 1s. 6d. and upwards. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A late-Victorian composed salad in which the dressing is made to order at the table's edge. Everything hinges on the emulsion, and on keeping the leaves dry.
- Add the oil slowlyTen tablespoons of oil to two yolks is about 150 ml to 40 g — a workable ratio, but only if the first spoonful goes in literally drop by drop and the mixture is beaten smooth before more follows. Once it has taken and looks like thick cream, the oil can go in a thin steady stream.
- If it splitsStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it a spoonful at a time. Room-temperature yolks and oil emulsify far more reliably than cold ones straight from the fridge.
- Raw yolksNothing here is cooked, and the sauce sits on cold shellfish. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the dressed dish refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- A salt-spoonfulThe Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon, so "half a salt-spoonful" is about an eighth of a teaspoon — a light hand. Taste and correct at the end rather than trusting the figures.
- Four tablespoons of vinegarThat is a sharp, slack mayonnaise by modern taste. Start with one tablespoon of tarragon vinegar, get the emulsion thick, then let acidity and consistency guide the rest.
- Hen lobster and coralThe recipe wants a female for the coral, the dark green roe that turns scarlet on boiling. Fishmongers rarely sort by sex now; ask, or accept a cock lobster and garnish with paprika or finely chopped chive instead. The coral should be dried briefly, then pushed through a fine sieve to powder it.
- Dry the leaves properlyWater on the lettuce thins the sauce and makes it slide off. A salad spinner, or a clean towel and ten minutes, does what the original expects.
- Assemble late"Just before serving" is not decorative advice: dressed leaves wilt quickly. Build the layers, refrigerate, and pour the sauce over at the last moment.
- YieldEight to ten as written suggests service as one dish among several rather than a main course. As a main-course salad, a single lobster will stretch to rather fewer.
Mayonnaise reached English cookery books from French practice in the nineteenth century, and its name has never been settled: it is variously traced to Port Mahon in Menorca, taken by the French in 1756, to the town of Bayonne, and to the old French verb manier, to handle or work. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households with a cook and a cold table to furnish, treats it as a technique to be learned rather than a bottled thing to be bought — hence the unusual step of stating the secret outright in the middle of the method. The dish itself belongs to the late Victorian supper and ball-supper repertoire, where lobster salads, dressed and garnished with beetroot and sliced hard-boiled egg, were expected to look as composed as they tasted. The stated cost of 1s. 6d. "and upwards" marks lobster as a treat rather than an everyday purchase, at a time when British inshore stocks were still landed in quantity and the railways carried fish inland packed in ice.