Lobster Mayonnaise
INGREDI--INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-1 ENTS for dish for 6 persons.-1 large or 2 smc!! lobsters, 1 pint of aspic jelly, 3 hardboiled eggs, a large lettuce, a few tarragon leaves, capers, truffles (if procurable), stoned olives, pepper and salt, mayonnaise sauce.
AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Put enough melted jelly into a quart border mould as will thinly coat it; and when it begins to set, arrange in it the flesh of the body and claws of the lobster, cut into neat pieces, the tarragon leaves, tiny pieces of the truffle and a few capers; then fill up the mould with jelly. When firmly set, turn out of the mould and fill the centre with the lettuce cut up with the remainder of the lobster. Put a little salad round the mould and mask both that and what is in the centre with a good mayonnaise sauce. Garnish with the truffles sliced, the eggs and the small claws of the lobster.
SEASONABLE at any time. lobster, 4 tablespoonfuls of white stock, 2 tablespoonfuls of cream, pounded mace and cayenne to taste; bread-crumbs. AVERAGE CosT, 2s. 6d.
Pick the meat from the shell and cut it up into small square pieces; put the stock, cream and seasoning into a stewpan, add the lobster and let it simmer gently for 6 minutes. Serve it in the shell, which must be nicely cleaned and have a border of puffpaste; cover it with bread-crumbs, place small pieces of butter over and brown before the fire, or with a salamander.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A moulded aspic ring of lobster, turned out and masked with mayonnaise — a cold buffet centrepiece of the sort that carried a late-Victorian or Edwardian supper table. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing of the jelly is everything.
- The hinge: line the mould in stagesCoat the chilled mould with jelly that has cooled to the point of thickening but is still pourable, and let it set before you lay in the lobster, tarragon and truffle. If the jelly is warm the decorations slide to the bottom; if it has set too far it will not bond to the next layer and the border will crack when you unmould it.
- Quantities and the mouldA quart border mould is about 1.1 litres. One pint of aspic (UK pint, 20 fl oz / 570 ml) will coat it and fill up around the lobster. The recipe offers one large or two small lobsters as alternatives and gives no weights.
- Aspic jellyMrs Beeton assumed a clarified stock jelly made from veal or calf's foot. A well-made fish or light chicken stock, clarified and then set with powdered gelatine -- a sachet (7 g) per 500 ml at the least, more for a border firm enough to turn out -- gives a comparable clean border; commercial aspic powder also works and needs no clarifying.
- Truffles"If procurable" is doing real work. Preserved black truffle in a small jar is the practical substitute, sliced thin for the garnish; black olive rings give the same graphic effect if you would rather not spend the money.
- Cooked lobster onlyThe recipe presumes lobster already boiled and cooled. Cook it the day before if you like, but keep the picked meat refrigerated and assemble the mould cold — a set aspic dish sits at room temperature only for the time it is on the table.
- UnmouldingDip the mould for a few seconds in hot water, or wrap it briefly in a cloth wrung out in hot water, then invert onto a chilled dish. Do not immerse it long enough to melt the decorated surface.
- Masking with mayonnaise"Mask" means to coat, not to spoon over at table. Thin the mayonnaise very slightly with cream or lemon juice so it flows and coats without sliding off the cold jelly.
- Cost3s. 6d. is a price from the book's own era and no guide to what lobster costs now; treat it as a period detail rather than a budget.
Mayonnaise-dressed shellfish set in aspic belongs to the grand cold-table tradition that ran from Carême's *cuisine froide* through the English country-house sideboard, and the border mould — a ring turned out with salad heaped in the middle — was one of its standard forms. Lobster was expensive but not exotic in Britain: it was landed in quantity around the Scottish and Cornish coasts and reached London and the inland towns by rail, which is plausibly why Beeton's editors could mark it "seasonable at any time", though the connection is an inference rather than something the books state. The reliance on clarified jelly is a mark of the period's kitchen labour, since a bright aspic meant a long-simmered stock and a careful clarification with egg white; when commercial gelatine and aspic powders became cheap in the twentieth century the dish spread down the social scale, then fell out of fashion with the moulded salad generally.