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Lobster Salad
I canned or boiled lobster 3 skinned tomatoes 4 small crisp lettuces 1 bunch watercress 2 hard cooked eggs Mayonnaise dressing A little pepper Wash and dry the lettuces and the watercress.
Cut the lettuce and put it into a dainty earthenware dish; then put in a layer of the watercress, a layer of the lobster sprinkled with pepper, and a layer of the eggs cut in slices.
Cover with mayonnaise dressing and ornament with slices of tomato and hard cooked egg alternately. If preferred, sardines may replace the lobster.
A layered composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the only real work is in the components. Nothing here needs updating for safety, but a few of the assumptions are worth spelling out.
- Lobster quantity"1 canned or boiled lobster" in this period probably meant a lobster of about 1 to 1.5 lb, which picks out at something in the region of 5 to 8 oz of meat. A 6-oz can of lobster, or an equivalent weight of cooked lobster meat, is in the right range.
- The dish itselfThe earthenware dish is specified for presentation. Nothing goes near heat, so use any shallow bowl or platter that shows the layers.
- Skinning tomatoesScore the skins, drop them in boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then into cold water. Slice them just before assembling so they do not weep into the mayonnaise.
- LettucesFour "small crisp lettuces" means four heads of something like Little Gem or the heart of a small romaine, not four leaves. Two large romaine hearts will do.
- MayonnaiseA period mayonnaise dressing was raw-yolk emulsion, thinner and sharper than jarred mayonnaise. If making it from scratch, use pasteurised eggs; otherwise loosen commercial mayonnaise with lemon juice and a little cream so it drapes rather than sits.
- Assembly and timingDress and layer within an hour of serving. Watercress collapses under mayonnaise quickly, and lobster meat turns watery once salted and left standing.
- SeasoningThe recipe calls only for pepper, on the assumption the mayonnaise carries the salt. Taste the dressing first and salt it there rather than over the lobster.
- YieldServes four as a light main course, six to eight as a first course.
Lobster salad was a fixture of Anglo-American cold luncheon and supper tables from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when canned lobster from the Maritime provinces and New England made the meat available far inland and year-round. The layered construction, built up in a dish and "ornamented" with alternating tomato and egg, belongs to the same decorative impulse that produced moulded aspics and piped salads in the period's cookery books, where a cold dish was expected to be looked at before it was eaten.