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Lobster Salad (Cut lobster meat in dice)
Cut lobster meat in dice and marinate with French dressing. Keep on ice until ready to serve, then drain carefully. Make cups of the inside leaves of lettuce, put a spoonful of the lobster meat in the centre of each cup, and press mayonnaise dressing through a pastry bag with star tube attached on the top of the lobster in each nest. Or, arrange the lobster in a mound on a bed of lettuce leaves, and mask the mound with mayonnaise. Finish the centre with a little bouquet of the heart leaves of lettuce; sift dried coral in a circle about it, and below that arrange circles
A composed salad from the era when the plating mattered as much as the dish. The recipe assumes you have boiled the lobster yourself and know what to do with the roe, and the text breaks off mid-sentence in the original.
- Start with cooked lobsterThe book takes for granted that the lobster arrives boiled. Two 1 1/4-lb hard-shell lobsters yield roughly 1/2 lb of picked meat, enough for four to six lettuce cups; a pound of picked meat serves six as a mound.
- French dressing means vinaigrettePeriod French dressing was generally oil and vinegar in something like three-to-one proportion with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken but not emulsified with egg. Twenty to thirty minutes of marinating is plenty for lobster; longer and the acid begins to firm and dull the meat.
- Drain, and mean itThis is the hinge. Any dressing clinging to the dice will thin the mayonnaise and slide it off the mound. Tip the lobster into a sieve, let it sit a few minutes, then blot with a towel before assembling.
- CoralThe dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral-red on cooking. To dry it, spread it on a plate in a very low oven (200F) until it crumbles, then push it through a fine sieve. It is a garnish for colour and a little brine, not a flavour base, and a male lobster will not have any.
- Keep on iceRead this as the refrigerator, and keep the assembled salad there until the moment it goes to the table. Picked shellfish dressed in oil and mayonnaise should not sit at room temperature for more than an hour.
- MayonnaiseA period cook made this by hand from raw yolks. If you are making your own rather than opening a jar, use pasteurised eggs, since nothing here is cooked after assembly. The mayonnaise must be stiff enough to hold a star-tube ridge; slacken it and it will simply pool.
- Lettuce cupsIceberg or a firm butterhead gives the cupped inner leaves the recipe wants. Wash and dry them thoroughly and chill them so they stay rigid under the filling.
- The unfinished sentenceThe original text ends in the middle of describing the garnish rings around the mound. Period versions of the same arrangement finish with concentric circles of sieved hard-boiled egg yolk, chopped white, capers or minced parsley below the coral, and any of those will complete it in keeping.
Lobster salad was one of the standard luxury dishes of the American cold table between about 1880 and 1920, and books of this kind treat it as a set piece for luncheons and card parties. The double instruction here, individual lettuce cups piped with mayonnaise or a single masked mound ringed with garnish, reflects a period preoccupation with what cookery writers called "dressing" a dish: the same food arranged either as a plated portion or as a centrepiece for the buffet. The sifted coral is characteristic of that mindset, a decorative use for the roe of a cook working from whole lobsters broken down in the kitchen, so the coral was simply there to be used.