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Lobster Salad III
Remove large claws and split a lobster in two lengthwise by beginning the cut on inside of tail end and cutting through entire length of tail and body. Open lobster, remove tail meat, liver, and coral, and set aside. Discard intestinal vein, stomach, and fat, and wipe inside thoroughly with cloth wrung out of cold water. Body meat and small claws are left on shell. Remove meat from upper parts of large claws and cut off (using scissors or can opener) one-half the shell from lower parts, taking out meat and leaving the parts in suitable condition to refill. Cut lobster meat in one-half inch cubes MEXICAN JELLY. - Page 335.
LOBSTER SALAD III. - Page 342.
OYSTER CRABS À LA NEWBURG; INDIVIDUAL SERVICE. - Page 357. SWEETBREAD RAMEQUINS. - Page 371 and mix with an equal quantity of finely cut celery. Season with salt, pepper, and vinegar, and moisten with Mayonnaise Dressing. Refill tail, body, and under half of large claw shells. Mix liver and coral, rub through a sieve, add one tablespoon Mayonnaise Dressing and a few drops anchovy sauce, with enough more Mayonnaise Dressing to cover lobster already in shell. Arrange on a bed of lettuce leaves.
This is the show-piece version of lobster salad, served back in the shell. The lines about Mexican Jelly, Oyster Crabs and Sweetbread Ramequins are captions from a photographic plate that the scanner dropped into the middle of the text; ignore them.
- Start with a cooked lobsterThe recipe assumes a lobster already boiled and cooled. A 1½ to 2 lb hard-shell lobster gives roughly a cup to a cup and a half of meat.
- Liver and coralThe "liver" is the tomalley, the soft green mass; the coral is the roe, present only in a hen lobster, and it turns bright red when cooked. Current advice from several state and federal agencies is to limit or avoid tomalley, since it concentrates contaminants and biotoxins; the salad works without it, dressed with plain mayonnaise.
- What to discardThe "stomach" is the sac behind the eyes, the "intestinal vein" the dark line running the length of the tail. Both come out cleanly with the point of a knife.
- Opening the clawsThe recipe names scissors or a can opener; kitchen shears do the job. Cut away half of each lower large-claw shell so it stays a usable cup, and keep the small claws and body meat in place as decoration.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggThe dressing is uncooked and the salad is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise, keep the assembled dish under refrigeration, and serve within a few hours.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled anchovy condiment of the era, much thinner than modern anchovy paste. A little anchovy paste let down with lemon juice will stand in for the "few drops."
- Celery in equal quantityHalf the bulk of this salad is celery, which reads as thin by modern standards but keeps the rich dressing in check. Cut it fine and dry it well, or the mayonnaise will loosen and run.
- YieldOne lobster dressed this way serves two as a lunch course, or four as a first course if the meat is divided among smaller shells or lettuce cups.
Lobster served back in its own shell on a bed of lettuce belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American fashion for "individual service" — a plated, garnished course that owed its look to hotel and restaurant dining rooms. Fannie Merritt Farmer gives three lobster salads in a row, from the plainest tossed version to this one, a habit of graded recipes that reflects the Boston Cooking School's classroom method. Lobster was often said to have been cheap and abundant along the New England coast through much of the century, canned in quantity and thought of as humble food, though it was already a fashionable restaurant item in eastern cities well before the 1890s, when rail transport and ice widened its reach; cookbooks began treating it as something to be presented rather than merely eaten. The mixture of tomalley and coral rubbed through a sieve into mayonnaise works much as a French sauce technique does — beurre de homard and sauce corail proceed the same way — appearing here in an American domestic-science kitchen.