Lobster Salad
1 boiled lobster 1 head lettuce Mayonnaise dressing Lobster coral Cut boiled lobster into one-inch pieces and keep on ice until ready to serve. Arrange fresh lettuce in a bowl; pour the lobster mixed with Mayonnaise in the center; smooth the top; cover well with dressing and sprinkle with powdered lobster coral.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the whole thing depends on temperature: everything must be cold when it goes together and cold when it reaches the table.
- How much lobsterThe recipe says only "1 boiled lobster." A modern 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb hard-shell lobster yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of picked meat, which would dress about four small salad servings, or two as a lunch course.
- Cooking the lobsterIf starting from live, 8 to 10 minutes at a hard boil for a 1 1/4 lb lobster, then straight into ice water to stop the carryover cooking. Overcooked tail meat turns cottony and no amount of mayonnaise hides it.
- Powdered coralCoral is the roe, found only in females, black-green when raw and bright red once cooked. The recipe assumes you have it; to powder it, dry the cooked coral gently in a very low oven until brittle, then press it through a fine sieve. Lobsters bought already cooked from a fish counter often come without it, and paprika is sometimes substituted for the color, though it adds little flavor.
- One-inch piecesCut the tail into medallions across the grain and leave the claw meat in whole pieces. Shredding the meat loses the point of a salad built to look like something.
- MayonnaiseThe dressing intended here is a thick homemade mayonnaise, stiff enough to mask the top of the salad without sliding off. If you are making it with raw yolks and serving it to anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs.
- "Keep on ice"This means what it says. Dress the lobster no more than half an hour before serving and hold it refrigerated; cut shellfish sitting in mayonnaise at room temperature is the one real risk in the dish.
- The lettuce"A head of lettuce" in this period most likely meant a soft butterhead or a loose leaf; crisphead types existed but were not yet the default. Use whole leaves as a cup to line the bowl rather than chopping them, since the salad is meant to be spooned out from a lined shell.
Lobster salad belongs to the era when cooked and canned lobster became cheaper and more widely shipped, and it appears in many American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s as a ladies' luncheon dish, a buffet dish, and a way to use a lobster already boiled for something else. The finishing touch here is the older one: sieved coral was a familiar nineteenth-century garnish, and it also colored lobster butter and lobster sauce. Its retreat from home kitchens is plausibly tied to buying lobster meat pre-picked rather than to any change in taste. A salad like this one would sit easily in a lunch menu between a soup and a sweet.