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Lobster Fingers
Chop lobster meat very fine; season to taste with French dressing. Cut the bread in pieces about four inches long and an inch and a half wide.
Finish as usual. Garnish with parsley and the slender feelers of the lobster.
A tea-table sandwich in the shape of its own garnish: narrow fingers of buttered bread filled with dressed lobster. The original assumes you already know the book's standard sandwich method, so most of the work here is filling in what "as usual" meant.
- "Finish as usual""Finish as usual" points back to the book's standard sandwich method, which this page does not restate — presumably buttering the bread and closing the sandwich, with trimming and covering left to the cook's habit. Butter is worth keeping: it is what stops a wet lobster filling from soaking the crumb.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil and vinegar, commonly around two or three to one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. Some period versions add a little mustard or paprika; none is the sweetened bottled dressing of later decades. Use only enough to bind, or the bread will go through.
- The lobsterCooked meat, picked from a boiled or steamed lobster — a 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobster yields about a cup, enough for a dozen fingers. Claw and knuckle meat chops better than tail. Frozen picked lobster works but should be drained and pressed dry first.
- Chop, do not pulse"Very fine" here means knife-chopped to a coarse mince that still has texture. A food processor turns lobster to a pink paste that reads as canned.
- BreadA close-grained white sandwich loaf cut thin, about 1/4 inch, and preferably a day old so it slices cleanly. The recipe as written cuts the bread to four inches by an inch and a half first; squaring up a closed sandwich afterwards is an alternative if the edges will not line up.
- The feelersThe garnish is the lobster's antennae, laid alongside the fingers to echo the shape. Decorative only, and inedible — say so if you are serving to people who do not know.
- Yield and holdingAbout a dozen fingers from one cup of filling and eight slices of bread. Dressed shellfish on bread is a same-day proposition: assemble within a couple of hours of serving and keep chilled until the last minute.
Lobster was more plentiful and far cheaper than it later became, and it turns up constantly in turn-of-the-century salad and chafing-dish books as an everyday luxury rather than a rare one — though by 1900 prices had already risen as stocks were fished down, and the great Maine canneries had largely given way to Canadian packers. The shaped sandwich — fingers, rounds, hearts, rolled cylinders — belonged to the afternoon tea and card-party table, where the point was that a sandwich should be small enough to eat in two bites without a plate and pretty enough to need no further apology. Naming it for its shape and then garnishing it with the actual antennae is characteristic of the era's decorative logic: the dish is expected to announce its own contents. "French dressing" in American books of this date means simply oil, vinegar and seasoning; the sweetened orange bottled product that later claimed the name is a twentieth-century development.