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Red Mayonnaise, No. 2
(For fish.) Pound dried lobster coral in a mortar, sift, and add gradually to the dressing, to secure the shade desired. Or, after the salad is arranged in the bowl, or in nests, mask the top with mayonnaise of the usual color, and sift the coral over the centre, leaving a ring of yellow around the edge.
This is a colouring instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a bowl of plain mayonnaise and a lobster you have cooked yourself. Everything depends on getting the coral, which is the one part of the dish a supermarket will not sell you.
- What coral isThe "coral" is the roe of a female lobster, dark green-black when raw and turning bright scarlet as it cooks. It is found in the body cavity of a hen lobster, so this dressing is a by-product of having boiled a whole lobster rather than something you buy separately.
- Drying itThe recipe presumes dried coral. Cooked coral is spread on a plate or pan and dried in a very slow oven until it crumbles between the fingers; only then will it pound to a powder fine enough to sift. Damp coral will pill and streak the mayonnaise instead of tinting it.
- Mortar and sieveA small food processor or spice grinder does the pounding faster, but still push the powder through a fine sieve. Ungraded specks read as grit in a smooth dressing.
- Add it graduallyThe instruction to work it in "to secure the shade desired" is the point of the recipe. Coral colours strongly and also thickens slightly; a teaspoon at a time into a cup of mayonnaise, stirred and judged, avoids an opaque brick-red dressing that tastes chalky.
- If you have no coralSweet paprika, a spoonful of tomato paste, or a little cooked beetroot puree will give the pink shade, though none carries the shellfish flavour. Say so on the menu, since the colour reads as lobster to anyone who knows the older sauces.
- The second methodMasking the salad with plain mayonnaise and sifting coral over the centre is the better option if you have only a small amount. Sift through a tea strainer held well above the dish so the powder falls evenly, and do it shortly before serving, as the colour will bleed into the dressing on standing.
- Raw egg baseA period mayonnaise is uncooked yolk and oil. If it is being served to anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, build the dressing on pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- YieldThe original gives none. One hen lobster's coral, dried, is roughly two to three teaspoons of powder, enough to tint about a cup of mayonnaise, which dresses fish salad for four to six.
Coral was too useful a colour for nineteenth-century cooks to waste. The same dried, pounded roe went into lobster butter, into the pink sauces served with turbot and salmon, and into the garnishes that gave a cold buffet its bands of colour before food dyes were common in domestic kitchens. The second method here, masking the salad and sifting the powder over the centre to leave a yellow ring, is pure table decoration of the period, and it also quietly economises on a scarce ingredient. Coral is a rarity on modern plates where it was once simply what came out of the lobster.