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Lobster Salad
This may be made the same, although it is generally served on lettuce leaves without the celery, as it is in season when celery is not.
Boiled fish left over from one meal, may be made into a salad for another. Simply serve on crisp lettuce leaves with Mayonnaise dressing.
Canned salmon may also be served the same way.
This is a variant entry that leans on the salad recipe printed just above it, so read the two together: cooked meat or fish, cut up, dressed with mayonnaise, served on lettuce. What needs translating is mostly the seasonal logic and the handling of the fish.
- "The same" means the preceding saladThe instruction assumes you have just read the salad above, which was bound with mayonnaise and included cut celery. That recipe is not reprinted here, so its main ingredient and its cut are not stated. Here the celery is dropped and the lettuce leaf becomes the vehicle.
- Why no celeryCelery was then largely a cold-weather crop, trenched and blanched, sold from autumn through winter, while lobster was a summer food; that is the seasonal clash the recipe itself points to. With year-round celery there is no reason not to include it if you want the crunch.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Figure 4 to 5 oz of picked lobster meat per person as a main-course salad, about half that as a first course; one 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly 6 oz of meat.
- Cut the meat, don't shred itClaw and knuckle meat left in large pieces, tail sliced into medallions across the grain. Mayonnaise-bound lobster that has been chopped fine turns to paste and loses the whole point of the ingredient.
- Leftover boiled fishThe advice to use yesterday's fish is sound in a house with a cold larder and a same-day habit. Modern practice: refrigerate the cooked fish promptly, use it within two days, flake it off the bone cold, and keep the dressed salad chilled until it goes to the table.
- Canned salmon then and nowPeriod cans contained skin and softened vertebrae along with the flesh. Drain well and lift out any skin and bone; the liquid will thin mayonnaise badly if it goes in with the fish.
- The mayonnaiseThe dressing referred to is presumably the mayonnaise given elsewhere in the same book, and mayonnaise of the period was normally built on raw yolks. If you make your own rather than opening a jar, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this salad is cooked after the dressing goes on.
- Dress at the last momentSalt in the mayonnaise draws water out of both fish and lettuce. Bind the meat just before serving and set it on the leaves at the table, or the leaves collapse and the dressing breaks into a puddle.
Lobster salad turns up often in American household manuals of the 1880s and 1890s, a legacy of the earlier nineteenth century, when lobster was a cheap coastal protein rather than a luxury; by the 1880s and 1890s prices had risen substantially, though the dish remained familiar, with the catch shipped inland packed in ice or, increasingly, in cans. The alternative offered here, canned salmon, tells the same story from the other coast: the Columbia River canneries from the late 1860s onward, and the Fraser River canneries after them, put tinned salmon into pantries across the continent at a price that made it a weekday food, and cookbooks of the period treat it as an obvious stand-in for fresh fish in cold dishes. The entry is a reminder that a salad in 1900 was defined by its dressing and its bed of greens, not by being meatless; the lettuce leaf and the mayonnaise are the recipe, and the fish is whatever the season or the shelf provides.