Lobster Salad
2 lobsters (weighing four or five pounds) The tender leaves from two heads of lettuce ½ pint of mayonnaise Boil the lobsters as directed for Boiled Lobster. cold, take out the meat, being careful not to break the body or tail shells, and rejecting the stomach, the vein running along the back of the tail, and the spongy fingers on the outside of the body. Cut the meat into dice with a silver knife, and stand it in a cold place until When wanted. Make the mayonnaise. Clean the two tail shells, and one back, in cold water, and with scissors, remove the thin shell from the under side of the tail. Wash and dry the lettuce leaves, put them around the salad dish in two or three layers. Join the shells together in the form of a boat, the body shell in the centre, place them in the salad dish. Mix the mayonnaise and lobster together, put it into this boat. If there is any coral, mash it fine and sprinkle it over the whole. Garnish with a chain of the whites of hard boiled eggs cut into slices and linked together. Serve immediately.
A dish built as much for the table as for the palate: the work is in the boning and the shell "boat," not the seasoning. Two things need attention before you start — the amount of mayonnaise called for, and keeping the picked meat properly cold.
- The mayonnaise is far too muchTwo lobsters of that size yield roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of picked meat, which 1½ pints (3 cups) of mayonnaise would drown. Dress with about ¾ to 1 cup, folded in gently, and pass the rest at the table.
- Lobster size"2 lobsters (weighing four or five pounds)" is ambiguous: it most likely means the pair together, i.e. two hard-shell lobsters of about 2 to 2½ lb each, though period recipes sometimes gave the weight per lobster. Buy them live and heavy for their length; a soft, recently moulted lobster gives watery meat that will not hold in dice.
- Cross-reference to Boiled LobsterThe book sends you elsewhere for the cooking. Current practice is roughly 12 to 15 minutes at a hard boil for a 2 lb lobster, timed from when the water returns to the boil, then straight into ice water so the meat firms and stops cooking.
- What to discardThe "spongy fingers on the outside of the body" are the gills; the "vein running along the back of the tail" is the intestine. The green tomalley (liver) and the coral are edible in the old style, though tomalley concentrates contaminants and current advice is to leave it out.
- CoralCoral is the unfertilised roe, found only in hen lobsters, and it is black-green until cooked, when it turns coral red. If your lobsters are males there will be none, and the dish simply goes without the red sprinkle.
- The silver knifeA period instruction aimed at carbon-steel blades, which discoloured the meat and left a metallic taste. Stainless steel is fine now. Cut in clean ½-inch dice so the salad keeps its shape in the shell.
- Keeping it coldPicked lobster and homemade mayonnaise both sit in the danger zone quickly. Hold the meat and the dressing separately in the refrigerator, combine at the last moment, and serve immediately as directed rather than letting the assembled boat stand on a warm sideboard.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseThe dressing is never cooked. Use pasteurised eggs, or a good bought mayonnaise, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- YieldNo serving number is given. As a first course or a lunch salad this feeds six to eight.
Lobster salad belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American summer table, when cold cookery was a serious branch of household instruction and dishes were judged partly on how they looked coming through the door. The elaborate presentation here — the tail shells and carapace reassembled into a boat, the whites of hard-boiled eggs sliced and "linked together" as a chain — is characteristic of Victorian dining-room display, the same impulse that produced moulded aspics and dressed salmon. Canning and refrigerated rail transport had by then made lobster a fashionable ingredient along the American East Coast; it is often said to have had an earlier reputation as cheap food fit for servants and prisoners, though that story is usually repeated more broadly than the evidence supports. Cold dishes, richly dressed and handsomely built, carried the summer meal.