Lobster Salad
Use fresh lobster if it can be procured. Boil, remove the intestinal tract, and with a silver fork remove the meat in small pieces from the shell. Mix with one-half the quantity of diced cucumbers or celery, and marinate. Cover with mayonnaise when ready to serve.
A four-sentence recipe that assumes you already know how to cook a lobster and what "marinate" meant in 1911. The gaps are worth filling.
- "Marinate" means dress with vinaigrette"Marinate" means dress with oil and vinegar -- In period salad writing, to marinate is to toss the cut ingredients in oil and vinegar with salt and pepper and let them stand a while in the cold before the mayonnaise goes on. Proportions and timing are left to the cook. Skipping this step is the difference between seasoned lobster and lobster hidden under mayonnaise.
- Cooking the lobsterA 1 to 1 1/4 lb live lobster needs about 8 to 10 minutes in heavily salted boiling water, a couple of minutes more for each additional half pound. Chill it fully before picking; warm meat weeps and thins the dressing.
- The intestinal tractThis is the dark vein running the length of the tail. Remove it along with the gritty stomach sac behind the eyes. The green tomalley and any coral are edible, and some cooks worked them into the mayonnaise, though the flavour is strong.
- The silver forkEstes does not say why, but ordinary steel of the period was not stainless and could discolour and taint delicate shellfish, which is the usual explanation for such directions. Any modern stainless or plastic tool is fine.
- Proportions"One-half the quantity" is most simply taken as half as much cucumber or celery as picked meat, so for example 2 cups lobster to 1 cup diced cucumber or celery. Celery gives the crisper result; cucumber should be seeded and salted briefly, or it will water down the mayonnaise.
- Canned or frozen lobster"If it can be procured" acknowledges that fresh lobster was not reliably available, and that canned lobster was widely sold inland. Frozen tails work; thaw them in the refrigerator and drain thoroughly, as excess liquid is the main enemy of a bound salad.
- Yield and serviceTwo cups of meat serves about four as a first course, two as a lunch. Add the mayonnaise just before serving, as the recipe directs, with the salad well chilled.
Good Things to Eat was published in 1911 by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and went on to cook for the Pullman Palace Car Company and later for the Chicago subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Lobster salad belongs squarely to that world of dining cars, hotel buffets and club luncheons, where a cold bound salad could be prepared in advance and plated quickly. The instruction to "use fresh lobster if it can be procured" is a quiet reminder that a live one was a mark of a well-supplied kitchen. The direction to use silver rather than steel, and to add the mayonnaise only at the moment of service, are consistent with the standards of professional cold-kitchen work, though the recipe itself gives no reason for either.