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Lobster Salad Sandwiches
Mix one cup chopped lobster meat with mayonnaise.
Marinate crisp lettuce leaves. Arrange drained leaves on thin slices of bread; cover with lobster, and cover lobster with bread; sprinkle dried lobster coral on top of each sandwich. Prepare just before serving; if allowed to stand they will be unsatisfactory.
A tea-table sandwich from the era when lobster was a common East Coast staple rather than a luxury. Almost everything here turns on assembling at the last minute.
- The hinge: assemble to orderThe final line is the whole recipe. Mayonnaise and marinated lettuce will soak thin bread quickly. Cut the bread, hold the dressed lobster separately, and build the sandwiches as they go to the table.
- "Marinate" the lettuceIn period cookbooks this means to let stand in French dressing — oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — then drain well. For leaves going into a sandwich, a brief toss and a firm shake to drain is enough.
- Lobster coralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green raw and turning bright red when cooked. It was dried in a slow oven and rubbed through a sieve to a powder for garnish. Most lobster now sold is picked meat with no roe; the garnish can simply be omitted, and paprika is used as a garnish elsewhere in period sandwich chapters.
- The lobster itselfOne cup of chopped meat is roughly 5 to 6 ounces, about what a 1 1/2 lb hard-shell lobster yields. The meat is presumably already cooked, whether freshly boiled or from a can — canned lobster was ordinary grocery stock at the time.
- Mayonnaise quantityNone is given. Two to three tablespoons binds a cup of chopped meat without making it slack; more and the bread suffers.
- Butter the breadNot in the original, but a thin film of butter on each slice is the standard defence against a wet sandwich and was common practice in contemporary sandwich chapters.
- YieldA cup of lobster fills about four rounds of sandwiches, which crustless and quartered gives roughly sixteen small tea sandwiches.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks published to put a brand name in the kitchen. Its New England origin shows in a recipe like this one: lobster was canned in quantity in Maine and shipped inland from the mid-nineteenth century, though that boom had largely collapsed by the 1880s as stocks were depleted and prices rose through the turn of the century. The sandwich itself belongs to the fashion for afternoon tea and reception food that filled the sandwich and salad chapters of American cookbooks in this period, when thin crustless bread and a sieved coral or paprika garnish signalled a dish meant to be looked at as well as eaten.