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Lobster Salad
1 1/2 cups diced lobster meat 1/2 cup diced celery Vinegar Mayonnaise Lettuce Remove the meat from fresh boiled lobster chilled. Reserve the creamy or green fat, together with the coral. If there are eggs on the tail fins, save them also. Cut the meat not too small. Sprinkle a very little vinegar over the lobster, but keep the celery crisp until it is time to make the salad. Then mix the meat and celery together, stir in enough mayonnaise to moisten and flavor the whole. Arrange the salad on the center of a bed of crisp white lettuce bordered with green lettuce leaves laid under the outer edges. Pour on the remainder of the mayonnaise and sprinkle over it the coral, well pounded, and if liked the eggs and a few capers. Garnish with the claws. Sometimes lettuce leaves are arranged on a platter in cup-like clusters of two or three each, and the salad is divided equally among the clusters. The salad may be served in the cleaned lobster shells.
A plain 1920s lobster salad that depends almost entirely on the quality of the shellfish and the mayonnaise. Two details need attention today: how much lobster to buy, and what to do with the green tomalley the recipe asks you to save.
- How much lobster1 1/2 cups of diced meat is a little under 8 oz of picked meat, which will take a 2 lb hard-shell lobster or two smaller ones, since picked yield runs only about a quarter of live weight. As written the recipe serves two generously or four as a first course.
- The green fatWhat the recipe calls the creamy or green fat is the tomalley, the lobster's hepatopancreas. Public health advice in the US and Canada now discourages eating it, since it concentrates contaminants and marine biotoxins. The coral (the red roe of a female) is not under the same advisory and can be used as the garnish described.
- Pounded coralCoral is a dark greenish-black in a raw lobster and turns coral red only when cooked. Dry it briefly in a low oven, then press it through a fine sieve rather than pounding, and it will scatter over the mayonnaise as a fine powder.
- MayonnaiseA kitchen of this period made mayonnaise with raw yolks and would have made it close to serving time. Use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise if the salad will sit, and thin it with a spoonful of the lobster's own liquor rather than more oil.
- The vinegarA very little means a teaspoon at most, sprinkled on the cut meat shortly ahead. Use a light hand; more acid than that dulls the flavour of the meat.
- Keeping the celery crispThe instruction to hold the celery back is the hinge of the recipe. Cut it, drop it into ice water, drain and dry it just before mixing; celery dressed early weeps and thins the mayonnaise.
- Serving temperature and timeDressed shellfish salad should not sit at room temperature for more than about two hours, less in a warm room. Chill the platter and the lobster separately and assemble at the last moment.
- Serving in the shellIf you use the cleaned body shells, scrub them, scald them briefly and dry them well. The recipe garnishes with the claws; crack or split them so a guest can get at the meat.
The Delineator was a Butterick fashion magazine with a substantial cookery department, and its recipe books aimed at middle-class households that wanted company food without a full kitchen staff. Lobster salad had been such a dish since the mid-nineteenth century, when it appeared on hotel menus, at wedding breakfasts and at the late-evening suppers that followed a ball; it belonged to the same family as chicken salad and Waldorf, all of them cold, mayonnaise-bound and built for a buffet table. The presentation matters as much as the eating here, which is why so much of the text is given over to beds of white and green lettuce, borders, clusters and the claws laid on as a garnish. The instruction to save the coral and the tail eggs also reflects a period when lobster was bought whole and alive and nothing was thrown away without reason.