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Lobster Salad II
Prepare lobster as for Lobster Salad I. Add an equal quantity of celery cut in small pieces, kept one hour in cold or ice water, then drained and dried in a towel. Moisten with any cream or oil dressing. Arrange on a salad dish, pile slightly in centre, cover with dressing, sprinkle with lobster coral forced through a fine sieve, and garnish with a border of curled celery and watercress.
To Curl Celery. Cut thick stalks of celery in two-inch pieces. With a sharp knife, beginning at outside of stalks, make five cuts parallel with each other, extending one-third the length of pieces. Make six cuts at right-angles to cuts already made. Put pieces in cold or ice water and let stand over night or for several hours, when they will curl back and celery will be found very crisp. Both ends of celery may be curled if one cares to take the trouble.
A composed salad from the era when celery was the fashionable salad vegetable and garnish work counted as part of the cooking. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the steps need to be started well ahead.
- Start the celery the night beforeThe curled celery garnish needs several hours to overnight in ice water, and the diced celery for the salad wants a full hour. Neither is optional if you want the crispness the recipe is built around; limp celery makes the whole dish flat.
- "Prepare lobster as for Lobster Salad I"That is, boiled lobster, shelled, with the meat cut up as directed in the preceding recipe. Check Lobster Salad I for the quantity of lobster called for; a 1 1/4 lb lobster yields well under a cup of picked meat, so plan on more than one.
- The coralCoral is the roe, found only in female lobsters, black-green when raw and coral-red once cooked. If your lobster has none, the pink sieved garnish simply cannot be made; paprika is sometimes suggested in its place. The green tomalley is a different organ, and current health advice is not to eat it because of accumulated contaminants.
- "Any cream or oil dressing"In this book that covers the oil dressings (French dressing or mayonnaise) and the cream dressings. If you use a homemade raw-egg mayonnaise, use pasteurized eggs, since the salad is never heated.
- Dry the celery properlyWater clinging to the celery will thin the dressing and cause it to slide off the mound. Drain, then roll the pieces in a towel as the recipe says.
- Curling techniqueThe cuts are made only a third of the way down each two-inch piece, so the uncut end holds the fringe together. A thin, very sharp knife works better than a chef's knife; thick outer stalks curl more dramatically than pale inner ones.
- Serving and holdingDress it just before serving and keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table; a cream-dressed shellfish salad should not sit out.
Lobster salad belongs to the period when American lobster had moved from cheap coastal protein to a luxury of hotel and ladies'-luncheon menus, helped along by canning and by rail shipment of live lobsters inland. The pairing with celery is equally of its moment: through the late nineteenth century celery was a prestige vegetable, served in tall celery vases at the table, and it appears repeatedly as the crunch in this book's composed salads. The elaborate garnishing here — a border of curled celery and watercress, sieved coral for color — reflects the cooking-school habit of teaching appearance alongside seasoning. The closing line, that both ends may be curled "if one cares to take the trouble," is a fair summary of the school's attitude toward garnish generally.