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Lobster Salad, No. 2
Remove the flesh carefully from the shell of a lobster, so as to keep the shell of body and tail intact; wash and dry the shell and arrange on a bed of lettuce leaves. Marinate the flesh, cut into cubes, with French dressing. After an hour drain, mix with an equal quantity of shredded lettuce, and replace in the shell. Garnish with mayonnaise and the lobster coral. Dry the coral thoroughly, after which it may be passed readily through a sieve.
A presentation salad from the era when the emptied shell was the serving dish. The mechanics matter more than the seasoning here.
- Buy it cooked, or boil it wholeThe recipe assumes a whole cooked lobster you break down yourself. A 1 1/2 to 2 lb lobster yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of picked meat, which with the shredded lettuce serves two as a first course.
- Keeping the shell intactThe recipe wants the body and tail shell whole as a container, so work the meat out rather than cracking the shell apart: twist the tail off and draw the meat from the wide end. Rinse, dry, and chill the shell so it holds its shape.
- French dressingHere that means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine; period recipes run anywhere from about two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name now.
- An hour is long enoughDo not extend the marinating. Lobster is delicate and the acid firms and dulls it; an hour at refrigerator temperature is the outside limit, and the draining step is not optional or the salad will be watery.
- The coralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and coral-red once cooked. Dry it in a low oven or in a warm pan until crumbly, then push it through a fine sieve for the powdery garnish described. Not every lobster has any, so treat it as optional.
- Dress the lettuce lateShred the lettuce and fold it in just before serving. Left to sit in dressing it collapses, and the salad loses the bulk the shell is meant to hold.
- Mayonnaise as garnishThe mayonnaise is piped or spooned over the top, not stirred through, so the lobster keeps the vinaigrette flavour. Keep the assembled dish cold and serve within the hour.
Lobster salad served back in its own shell belongs to the late nineteenth-century American fashion for dishes returned to their natural containers, alongside stuffed tomatoes, oysters on the half shell, and stuffed eggs. Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899) came out of the Boston Cooking School world, where presentation was taught as seriously as technique and a chafing dish or a shaped salad was the mark of a competent hostess. The two-stage dressing here, vinaigrette to season and mayonnaise to finish, is characteristic of the period's salad practice: the acid does the flavouring, the mayonnaise does the decorating. By the 1890s lobster was a fashionable item along the New England coast, and cookbooks of the era give it several variations rather than one.