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Lobster Cocktail
Cut the lobster into small pieces; mix well with tomato catsup, lemon juice and salt. Serve in cocktail glasses.
Three lines, no quantities, and one silent assumption: the lobster is already cooked. Everything else is a matter of proportion and temperature.
- The lobster must be cooked firstThe recipe takes for granted that you have boiled lobster on hand, or canned lobster, which was widely available. Use fully cooked, chilled meat from the tail and claws; raw lobster dressed with catsup and lemon is not a dish this recipe intends.
- Proportions to work fromThe recipe gives none, so this is a reconstruction. For four small cocktail glasses, figure roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of lobster meat cut in half-inch pieces, with just enough catsup to coat it and the juice of half a lemon, and salt to taste. Mix, taste, and add lemon until the catsup's sweetness is cut.
- Period catsup was differentTomato catsup of the day was generally thinner and more assertively vinegared and spiced, and often less sweet than the modern bottle, though sweetened commercial brands existed. Today's ketchup will likely taste sweeter, which is why the lemon matters more than it looks on paper.
- Serve it very coldChill the lobster and the dressing separately, combine just before serving, and set the filled glasses on cracked ice. Dressing lobster too far ahead lets the acid soften the meat and thin the sauce.
- The glassA "cocktail glass" here is a small stemmed or footed glass of roughly 3 to 4 ounces, often set into a larger bowl of ice. Any small stemmed glass or coupe works; the portion is meant to be an appetite-opener, not a salad.
- What most cooks now addCommon modern additions -- Contemporary versions of the same formula often take a spoonful of grated horseradish, a few drops of Tabasco or Worcestershire, and sometimes celery salt. None of that is in the text, but such additions will keep the sauce from tasting flat.
- YieldOne 1 1/4-lb lobster yields only about a cup of picked meat; allow one lobster for two servings, or use canned lobster to make up the difference for four as a first course.
Shellfish cocktails came into American dining in the second half of the nineteenth century, when "cocktail" moved off the bar list and onto the menu as a small, cold, sharply dressed first course. The oyster cocktail is generally traced to San Francisco in the 1860s, and lobster, crab and shrimp versions followed once commercially bottled tomato catsup was cheap and everywhere -- the sauce that later hardened into the standard cocktail sauce is essentially the catsup-and-lemon mixture given here. A lobster cocktail was the kind of thing a hostess served in glasses on ice to open a company dinner, showy in presentation while asking almost nothing of the cook beyond a good lobster and a cold pantry.