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Lobster Salad Dressing
Sauce mayonnaise, as given in the last recipe but one, is the most suitable dressing for lobster salad. When oil is not liked, a dressing may be made as follows. Take the yolks of three eggs, which have been boiled hard and allowed to become cold. Rub them in a bowl with the back of a silver spoon until quite smooth. Add one tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, half a salt-spoonful of pepper, one table-spoonful of cream, and a table-spoonful of vinegar. Beat together until thoroughly mixed. A few drops of oil may be added or not. Time a quarter of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A cooked-yolk dressing of the kind made before bottled mayonnaise, for cooks who disliked the taste of salad oil. The whole point is texture: the yolks must be worked completely smooth before any liquid goes in, or the dressing stays granular and no amount of beating will fix it.
- Push the yolks through a sieveRubbing cold hard-boiled yolks with a spoon is slow work. Pressing them through a fine sieve into the bowl gives a smoother paste in seconds, and the mustard and cream then blend in without lumps.
- "Mixed mustard"This means prepared mustard already made up with water or vinegar, in the English style, not dry mustard powder. If you have only powder, use about half a teaspoonful slaked with a little cold water and left to stand ten minutes.
- Salt-spoonA Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is about an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper. Note that the recipe adds no salt at all; season to taste at the end, particularly if the lobster has been boiled in unsalted water.
- CreamVictorian cream was probably nearer modern single or light cream than double, though richness varied a good deal. Heavy cream works and gives a richer result, but the dressing will be thicker and may want a few extra drops of vinegar.
- VinegarMalt or white wine vinegar suits lobster; cider vinegar is acceptable. Add it last and slowly, beating as you go, since it is the acid that loosens the paste and it is easy to overshoot into something soupy.
- The silver spoonSilver was probably specified because ordinary steel of the period could react with vinegar and egg, leaving a metallic taste and grey streaks. Stainless steel or a wooden spoon is fine now.
- Oil is genuinely optionalThe closing note is not decoration. The few drops the recipe allows, beaten in one at a time, give a glossier dressing that clings better to lobster meat; leave it out entirely and the result is sharper and lighter.
- Yield and keepingSufficient for two or three, as stated. It contains cooked egg and cream, so keep it covered in the refrigerator and use it the same day.
Cassell's places this among its salad dressings as the alternative for households where "oil is not liked" — a real objection in nineteenth-century Britain, where imported olive oil was often rancid by the time it reached the table. Cooked-yolk dressings of this type, thickened by the egg alone and slackened with cream and vinegar, sit alongside the emulsified mayonnaise that largely displaced them, and survive in the boiled and creamy dressings of English and American cookery. The costing of sixpence is for the dressing only; lobster itself was the expensive part, though rather less of a luxury in Victorian Britain than now.