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Lobster Cocktail
Allow one-fourth cup lobster meat, cut in pieces, for each cocktail, and season with two tablespoons, each, tomato catsup and Sherry wine, one tablespoon lemon juice, six drops Tabasco Sauce, one-eighth teaspoon finely chopped chives, and salt to taste. Chill thoroughly, and serve in cocktail glasses.
A cold appetizer rather than a drink, and one where the seasoning is measured per serving. Read the quantities as a ratio and taste as you go.
- The sauce is heavy for the lobsterTwo tablespoons catsup plus two tablespoons sherry against a quarter cup of lobster gives more dressing than meat. Start with about half the sauce, toss, and add the rest only if the lobster still looks dry.
- Catsup has changedOlder tomato catsup was thinner, sharper and more spiced than the sweet modern product. Modern ketchup will read as candied here; the lemon juice and Tabasco are what pull it back, so do not cut them.
- SherryUse a dry fino or amontillado, not so-called cooking sherry, which is salted and will throw the seasoning off before you have added any salt of your own.
- Start with cooked lobsterThe recipe assumes lobster meat already boiled or steamed and cooled, since nothing here cooks it. Chilled cooked tail and claw meat, cut in bite-size pieces, is what is wanted.
- YieldA quarter cup of picked meat is roughly 1.5 oz, so a 1.25 lb lobster yields two to three cocktails. Multiply the seasonings by the number of servings.
- Cocktail glassesThis means a small stemmed glass, not a modern martini bowl. Any small stemmed or coupe glass works; set it in a bed of crushed ice if serving at table.
- Chilling matters"Chill thoroughly" is the one instruction to obey literally. Give the dressed lobster at least half an hour in the refrigerator so the sherry and lemon settle into the meat, and serve it cold enough to fog the glass.
Seafood cocktails were a relatively new fashion in American dining rooms in the late nineteenth century, and the oyster cocktail is traditionally traced to West Coast saloons of the later gold-rush decades, though the story is not firmly documented; the lobster and crab versions followed as restaurant menus expanded. What is notable in this formula is the sherry: the tomato-catsup-and-sherry dressing belongs to a moment before horseradish and bottled chili sauce hardened into the single "cocktail sauce" every American recognizes. Tabasco had been in production since 1868.