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Lobster Cocktail
Lobster 2 tablespoons tomato catsup 1 tablespoon lemon juice 5 drops Tabasco sauce 1/2 teaspoon onion, finely chopped For each cocktail, allow three tablespoons lobster. Cut in small pieces and season with sauce made of remaining ingredients mixed together. Serve very cold. Fruit cocktails serve as the introduction, or appetizer, of a lunch or dinner. In their role of appetizer, they should be fairly tart, well chilled, and arranged attractively in not too large portions. Fresh or canned fruits or juices may be used either alone or in combinations, and these combinations are innumerable. Melons should be iced before cutting, then seeds removed and portions served on crushed ice. Powdered sugar, salt or salt and pepper may be passed. Oranges and grapefruit may be cut in halves crosswise, and the core and seeds removed. Often the centers are filled with highly seasoned sugar or syrups, or other fruits added. Other fruits may be cut in balls or wedges, and served in cocktail cups. Some of these cups are made with an outer bowl to hold crushed ice.
A cold sauced lobster appetizer from the era when the cocktail glass held food rather than drink. The recipe assumes cooked lobster meat and gives its quantities per serving rather than per batch.
- The lobster is already cookedNothing here cooks the shellfish, so start with meat from a boiled or steamed lobster, chilled thoroughly. Picked claw and knuckle meat works as well as tail and is easier to cut into neat pieces.
- Quantities are per personQuantities are unclear " The recipe fixes only the lobster at three tablespoons per cocktail; it does not say how many cocktails the listed sauce ingredients dress. Judge by eye and scale the sauce to the number of servings.
- Tomato catsup, not chili sauceTomato catsup, not chili sauce " Catsup of this period was often thinner and less sweet than most modern bottled ketchup, though formulas varied. A spoonful of prepared horseradish or a little more lemon brings the sauce closer to that character.
- Five drops of TabascoMeasure it rather than shaking freely. Five drops in two tablespoons of catsup gives a definite heat that the cold and the sweetness both mute.
- OnionHalf a teaspoon means very finely minced raw onion, not a mild sweet variety chopped coarse. Mince it fine enough to disappear into the sauce, or grate it and use the juice.
- Serve very coldMix the sauce ahead and chill it separately, then dress the lobster shortly before serving so the meat does not sit and soften. Cocktail glasses set into a bowl of crushed ice, as the book describes for fruit, suit this equally well.
- Portion sizeThree tablespoons per person is a genuine appetizer portion and reads as small by current habit. Two or three ounces of meat per guest is a reasonable modern equivalent if the cocktail opens a substantial meal.
Seafood cocktails belong to the same American restaurant fashion, reported from the later nineteenth century onward, that produced the oyster cocktail: shellfish served raw or cold in a stemmed glass with a sharp tomato sauce before the meal proper. The name is generally taken to have borrowed the drink's glass and its place in the meal. Catsup sharpened with Tabasco, lemon and onion is a common formula in printed recipes of the 1920s and 1930s, and is close to what would later be sold ready-made as cocktail sauce. Lobster was the more expensive choice; similar sauces appear over shrimp, crab and oysters.