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LOBSTER SALAD (another way)
Arrange the lobster and the salad as in the last recipe. Boil two eggs until quite hard. Let them get cold, then cut the white part into slice, and lay them on the top of the salad, with a table-spoonful of bruised capers. Rub the yolks smoothly with the back of a spoon; mix with them a raw egg, well beaten, a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, salt, pepper, and sugar, a shallot finely minced, and four table-spoonfuls of salad-oil. The oil must be added in very small quantities at first, and the mixture well beaten between each addition. When well mixed and quite smooth, add one table-spoonful of tarragon vinegar, and, if the sauce is not sufficiently acid to suit the taste, add another spoonful of white wine vinegar. Toast three slices of the crumb of bread, cut them into small triangular pieces, butter them, spread a little caviare upon them, and put them round the salad. Pour the sauce over, and serve. Time to prepare, an hour. Probable cost, 3s. to 5s. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian cold-supper dressing built on hard-boiled yolks rather than raw yolks alone, which makes it far steadier than a plain mayonnaise. The recipe assumes you have already dressed the lobster over shredded lettuce as in the preceding entry.
- The hinge: oil by dropsFour tablespoons of oil into two cooked yolks and one raw egg will separate if hurried. Add the first spoonful a few drops at a time, beating smooth between each addition, and only then pour in a thin steady stream. Cooked yolks give the emulsion more tolerance than raw ones, but they do not make it foolproof.
- Raw eggThe whole raw egg is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs in shell or liquid form, keep the finished sauce refrigerated, and serve the same day. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised should skip an uncooked-egg dressing entirely.
- "Crumb of bread"The soft interior of a white loaf with the crust cut away, not breadcrumbs. Three slices cut into triangles gives roughly a dozen small toasts to fence the salad.
- CaviareIn Victorian Britain this generally meant salted sturgeon roe, a fashionable but obtainable import. Lumpfish, trout or salmon roe stands in without pretending to be the same thing; use it sparingly, since the sauce is already salted.
- Bruised capersCrush them lightly under the flat of a knife rather than chopping. Rinse brined capers, and rinse and soak salted ones, or the dressing will need no added salt at all.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out; it carries the dish. White wine vinegar alone is thinner in flavour. The second spoonful is optional, as the recipe says, so taste before adding it.
- ShallotOne shallot minced very fine. Modern banana shallots run large, so half of one may be nearer the quantity intended. Mince it as finely as you can, since it goes in raw.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives six to eight, which suits one dish among several on a cold table; fewer if served as a lunch course. The '3s. to 5s.' is the stated cost of the whole dish, with the lobster and caviare the main expense, and was a substantial outlay.
The book ran several lobster salads side by side, and this one is the dressier of them: capers, tarragon vinegar, a shallot, and caviare toasts arranged as a border. The sauce belongs to an older English line of salad dressings worked up from hard-boiled yolks, which were in use well before oil-and-raw-yolk mayonnaise settled into British kitchens under French influence in the nineteenth century; the raw egg here is a nod in that direction while the cooked yolks keep something of the older method's steadiness. Lobster salad was a fixture of the Victorian cold collation and the summer buffet, where dishes had to be composed in advance and look decorative, which suits the sliced whites laid on top and the triangles set round the edge. The stated cost of three to five shillings is a reminder that this was not everyday eating: a domestic servant of the period might earn well under a pound a week.