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Mayonaise De Homard, Etc
1. The largest quantity of lobster can be disposed of at hotel tables by serving it (after taking the meat out of the shell) plain, with only a little good vinegar poured over in the dish, and 2 or 3 crisp leaves of heart lettuce. It is one of the pleasures of the table for some people to make their own salads. 2. Cut the lobster as nearly in dice shape as may be, leaving the scraps and crumbs to be used for some other purpose-as fish sauce croquettes, lobster cutlets, etc.-and mix it with an equal quantity of boiled potatoes cut to correspond, in the hollandaise salad dressing. Use shred lettuce to garnish. 3. Chop 6 or 8 heads of white celery and stir into it a little oil, vinegar, pepper and salt.
Select enough fine large pieces of the lobster meat for about 25 individual dishes; sleep them in oil, vinegar, pepper and salt in a bowl, and dish one or two pieces laid diagonally on a spread out spoonful of the celery. 4. Prepare the mayonaise salad dressing with lemon juice insiead of vinegar, or vinegar, or part of the vinegar.
Chop six heads of celery with enough of the tenderest green tops mixed in to make it all light green. Cut the lobster in pieces all of one size and keep out the reddest meat in a dish by itself.
Dish a layer of the chopped celery in flat individual dishes; then lobster on that with the red pieces strewn at the edge where they will show among the green; then another spoonful of celery on top of the lobster, and press down the top slightly. Pour the mayonaise over just thin enough to run and mask without hiding the colors. These salads look like tufts of moss. 5. Steep the lobster in oil, vinegar, pepper and salt. Dish on flat dishes, spread thick mayonaise or other dressing on top, and decorate with quarters of boiled eggs, olives, pickles, capers, chopped lettuce, etc., as for shrimp salads.
Lobsters, crabs, crayfish and shrimps are all cooked by dropping them alive into boiling water, salted. It is the old world fashion of the fishermen who bring in the daily market supply of shrimps, to boil them in sea water, on their way in. They have boilers set in brick work in their boats for the purpose. And so, it is said, do the lobster fishers of Gaspe Bay, where lobsters do most abound. Shrimps take but a few minutes to cook, lobsters take half an hour and more.
The lobster coral or spawn, if these furnished happen to contain any, can be used, pounded and rubbed through a seive, to mix with mayonaise to give it a red color and serve for variety in ornamentation. Another great use of the coral is to make lobster butter by pounding it with an equal amount of fresh butter and rubbing through a seive. Add some lemon juice and chopped parsley. A tolerable substitute is the red claw meat of the lobster. This butter is used for spreading on bread or toast to build up salads on, and for sticking large pieces of lobster together. If seldom eaten it may be that the nature and composition of red butter is not generally understood. However, it goes well as a cold sauce with hot fish, and in that way is never wasted. Then there is green sauce. Just lately I was trapped into reading a bill of fare. It was a Christmas bill, printed large, and set in a restaurant window among the ornamented dishes of an evidently good cook, and the novelty of it was salmon with green sauce. Why green sauce instead of ravigote, remoulade, Montpellier, or something else that conveys no picture to the mind? But green sauce stretches away back to the time of the old Romans, and perhaps beyond them to the Babylonians and Persians.
Here, comparatively recent, yet written three hundred and seventy years ago, is a French book talking about green sauce: "`It is,' said Panurge, 'my lords the king of the clouted hose. I intend to make him an honest man. I will put him to a trade, and make him a crier of green-sauce And the poor devil began to cry.'" Truly, green sause might mean "garden-sass" or other things, but here are particulars: "Pantagruel gave them a little lodge near the lower street, and a mortar of stone wherein to bray and pound their sauce."
It must be inferred that green-sauce has at some times been cried as a marketable article like popcorn. Green sauce, the simple base, in modern French cookery is called ravigote, and consists of some half dozen kinds of herbs-tarragon, chives parsley, burnet and others, pounded to a green pulp and then pressed through a seive. Of this Ude, and then Careme made a dozen different combinations in hot sauces, like mint sauce with roast lamb, and cold green sauces and butters. Some of these are used solely for salads, Montpelier butter particularly, spread on toast as an ornamental border of foundation for lobster and fish. The expressed juice of pounded spinach leaves is relied upon for coloring a deeper green, and boiled celery leaves will answer as well. These sauces and condiments are not likely to become Americanized because of the danger of ignorant cooks using artificial green colorings, which are nearly all poisonous.
Five service ideas for a hotel pantry rather than one fixed recipe, written when a cook might be dressing lobster twenty-five plates at a time. The proportions scale down cleanly; the cooking times do not.
- Boiling time"Lobsters take half an hour and more" is far longer than modern practice and produces cotton-wool meat; market lobsters of the period were often larger than today's, though the text does not say so. A 1 1/4-1 1/2 lb lobster needs about 8-10 minutes at a hard boil, a 2 lb lobster about 12-15; shrimp, as the text says, take only a few minutes.
- "Sleep them in oil"A printer's slip for steep. The lobster is marinated briefly in oil, vinegar, pepper and salt before dishing, which seasons the meat from the outside in and is worth doing even in a modern version.
- Hollandaise salad dressingAlmost certainly a cold salad dressing given elsewhere in the book rather than the hot butter sauce served with asparagus. Substitute any thick cooked or emulsified dressing; hot hollandaise will collapse against cold potato and lobster.
- Heads of celeryA "head" is a whole bunch, not a rib. Six to eight bunches is hotel quantity; for six to eight servings, one bunch of pale inner ribs plus a few of the tenderest leaves gives the light-green chop the recipe wants.
- Coral and tomalleyThe green tomalley, and to a lesser degree the coral (roe), can concentrate cadmium and, in some waters, shellfish toxins; public health advisories warn against eating tomalley, which makes lobster butter of this kind questionable. The author's own fallback, pounded red claw meat, gives most of the color.
- Mayonnaise and raw yolkBoth the mayonnaise and the green butters are uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs if the salad will stand on a buffet, and keep everything under refrigeration; these were built in a cold pantry with ice, not at room temperature.
- Green coloringThe closing warning is literal, not squeamish. Nineteenth-century green food colors were commonly copper- and arsenic-based. Spinach or celery-leaf juice, as the text recommends, is still the correct way to green a ravigote.
- YieldNo. 3 is sized for about 25 individual dishes, and No. 4 appears to be on a similar scale. Divide by four for a household platter of six.
Jessup Whitehead was writing for American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the 1890s, when lobster was cheap enough to be pushed at the table in quantity - hence the opening advice on how to "dispose of" the largest amount of it, dressed by the guests themselves. The reference to Gaspé Bay is plausible for the period: the Gulf of St. Lawrence fishery was then a major supplier of the North American lobster trade, canned as well as fresh; note that the author reports the shipboard sea-water boiling only at second hand ("so, it is said"). The digression on green sauce is Whitehead in his usual essayistic mode; his quotation is from Rabelais's Pantagruel, a French book first published in the 1530s, which fits his "three hundred and seventy years ago" only loosely. The line from green sauce to ravigote and to the herb butters associated with Louis Eustache Ude and Antonin Carême in the early nineteenth century is a fair account of how these cold pounded-herb preparations reached the professional kitchens of his own day.