Lobster Salad
1 good sized lobster 1 head of lettuce 1/2 cup Mayonnaise dressing 1 measure of French dressing Cut the meat into small dice, marinate with the French dressing and set aside to season and chill. Shred the lettuce and chill. At serving time combine meat and lettuce, mix with dressing, place in salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves and garnish with the small leaves and small claws.
Shrimp, crabs and crawfish are prepared in the same way.
A short recipe that assumes a cook who already knows how to boil and pick a lobster. The only real technique here is the double dressing: French dressing to season the meat from the inside, mayonnaise only at the last moment.
- The lobster is already cookedThe book takes for granted that the lobster has been boiled and picked. A "good sized lobster" probably means a whole lobster of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, which yields somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat. Two small lobsters, or about 8 oz of purchased cooked meat, will do the same work.
- "One measure" of French dressingThis is genuinely vague, and it most likely points to a French dressing recipe elsewhere in the book. Figure on about 1/4 cup of oil-and-vinegar dressing for this quantity of meat: enough to coat, not enough to pool.
- Marinate brieflyThe recipe gives no time; thirty minutes to an hour chilled is enough. Acidic dressing left on shellfish for several hours tends to firm and dull the meat.
- Mayonnaise dressingPeriod mayonnaise was made at home from raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and behaves the same way in the bowl. If you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the salad cold.
- Drain before dressingThe recipe does not say so, but tip off any French dressing that has collected before adding mayonnaise, or the mayonnaise will thin and slide off the lettuce.
- Shredded lettuceA head of lettuce here means crisp head lettuce, shredded fine. Romaine or iceberg holds up; soft leaf lettuces collapse under mayonnaise within minutes of mixing.
- The claw garnishReserve the small claws whole when picking. The recipe asks only for these and for the small lettuce leaves as decoration.
- YieldServes four as a first course, or two as a lunch dish.
Lobster salad appears in nearly every American general-purpose cookbook of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Canned and cooked lobster meat shipped inland from New England and the Maritimes, so households well away from the coast could get some. The two-stage dressing method here — a thin acid marinade first, thick mayonnaise at the table — seems to have been common advice for cold shellfish and cooked meat salads of the era, and the closing line offering shrimp, crab and crawfish as substitutes shows how the formula was understood: a technique for cold protein in general, not a dish specific to lobster.