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Egg and Lobster Salad
Cook one dozen eggs, remove shells, cut a small piece from the top and a slice from the bottom of each, the latter to make them stand, remove yolks, fill the whites with lobster, celery and cucumber, all cut fine, and mixed with mayonnaise dressing. Serve one of these to each person upon plates of lettuce garnished with the yolks highly seasoned and made into tiny balls. A French dressing should be poured over the lettuce. Serve with this snowballs made of cream cheese and whipped cream, mashed smooth, and long strips of pulled bread, browned and hot. The eggs should be put in boiling water, which should not boil after eggs are in. Leave them in this bath thirty-five minutes. Linda
A composed salad from the era of the ladies' luncheon: hard-cooked egg whites used as cups, one per guest, with the seasoned yolks rolled into garnish. The instructions assume you can fill in the quantities, so most of the work of modernising is arithmetic.
- The egg method is the hingeEggs go into water already at a full boil, the pan comes off the heat, and they sit 35 minutes. This gentle carry-over cooking sets the whites firm enough to hold a filling without the rubbery, greenish-rimmed result of a hard boil. Use a pan wide enough that the dozen eggs sit in one layer and cover it, or the water will drop too far too fast.
- YieldOne filled egg per person means twelve servings. To serve six, use six eggs and halve everything else; the recipe scales cleanly.
- Filling quantitiesNone are given. For a dozen egg whites, figure about 1 lb picked lobster meat, one cup finely diced celery, one cup seeded and diced cucumber, and roughly half a cup of mayonnaise — enough to bind, not to loosen. Salt the cucumber and drain it first or the filling will weep on the plate.
- LobsterAllow three or four 1 1/4-lb lobsters for a pound of picked meat; a chicken lobster yields only about a quarter to a third of a pound. Canned lobster was already common in period cookbooks, and modern frozen or good-quality canned meat works here, since it is cut fine and dressed. Cooked shrimp or crab is a reasonable substitution.
- Mayonnaise and French dressingBoth were made fresh at home. Period mayonnaise is raw-yolk based; commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is the practical choice, especially for a dish that sits at room temperature. "French dressing" here means a simple vinaigrette, about three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper — no mustard-and-sugar bottled dressing.
- Standing the eggsThe slice from the bottom is what keeps each egg upright on the lettuce. Cut it thin, and cut it before you hollow out the white, or the shell of egg will collapse.
- SnowballsCream cheese mashed smooth with whipped cream, rolled into balls — roughly two parts cheese to one part cream by volume, chilled firm before shaping. The recipe says only to serve them with the salad; they read as a cheese element on the plate rather than a separate course.
- Pulled breadTear the soft crumb out of a day-old loaf in long ragged strips, leaving the crust behind. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time, only 'browned and hot'; a moderate oven, around 300-350F, until the strips are browned and crisp all the way through, will do it. Serve straight from the oven, as the recipe insists.
The hollowed egg white as an edible cup is a hallmark of turn-of-the-century American luncheon cookery, when salads were built rather than tossed and every plate arrived garnished. The recipe carries only the signature "Linda," and it preserves the loose, conversational style of a cook writing to other cooks rather than an editor writing a specification. The lobster is worth noting: by 1900 canned and shipped lobster had made the meat available well inland, and it was often cut fine and stretched with celery and cucumber. Pulled bread, the crumb torn from a loaf and re-baked, was a long-standing British and American way of producing something crisp to eat with salad or soup without buying crackers, and appears in household books throughout the nineteenth century.