Home › Sandwiches And Canapes › Lobster Sandwiches à la Boulevard
Lobster Sandwiches à la Boulevard
Mix an equal quantity of finely chopped lobster meat and the yolks of "hard-boiled" eggs forced through a sieve. Moisten with melted butter, and season with German mustard, beef extract diluted with a very small quantity of boiling water, and salt. Spread mixture between thin slices of buttered bread, remove crusts, and cut into fancy shapes. A small quantity of lobster meat is most successfully utilized in this way.
A thrifty filling built on cooked lobster stretched with sieved egg yolk. The seasoning is where it succeeds or fails: the beef extract must go in as a paste, not a puddle.
- Dilute the extract properlyBeef extract means a concentrate of the Bovril or Liebig type. Use no more than 1/4 teaspoon for a cup of filling, softened with a few drops of boiling water to a thick paste — any more liquid and the spread weeps into the bread.
- German mustardPeriod recipes use the term loosely for a prepared German-style mustard, generally smoother and less biting than Dijon, sometimes with a sweet-sour edge. Start with 1/2 teaspoon per cup and taste; Dijon substituted straight across will dominate the lobster.
- ProportionsEqual quantities by volume of chopped lobster and sieved yolk. Four ounces of picked lobster meat is about half a cup chopped, so it needs the yolks of five or six hard-cooked eggs to match it, plus 1 to 2 tablespoons melted butter — roughly a cup of filling, enough for eight to ten thin sandwiches, or rather fewer once cut into shapes.
- Sieving the yolksPush cooled yolks through a fine sieve or a potato ricer rather than mashing them. The point is a dry, fluffy powder that absorbs the butter and binds the lobster without mayonnaise.
- Butter twiceMelted butter goes into the mixture; soft butter is spread on the bread. The film of butter on the crumb is what keeps a moist seafood filling from soaking through, so take it to the very edges.
- Bread and shapesUse a firm, close-grained white sandwich loaf, a day old, sliced thin. Cut the shapes after filling and pressing, with a sharp cutter, and keep the trimmings for crumbs — the fancy cutting wastes a good deal of the loaf.
- Holding themAssemble no more than a few hours ahead, cover with a damp cloth and plastic and refrigerate. Cooked lobster and egg have no acid or preservative here; do not leave them standing at room temperature through a long party.
- Season lastBoth the extract and the butter carry salt. Mix, taste, and only then add salt.
The sandwich and canapé chapter belongs to the era of the afternoon reception, when crustless bread cut into rounds, diamonds and crescents was the expected offering with tea. French-sounding names such as "à la Boulevard" gesture at Parisian restaurant style, though the filling itself is a plain economy measure for using up the last of a lobster. Lobster was landed in quantity along the Massachusetts coast, though by the 1890s it was no longer the cheap food it had been earlier in the century; the book uses it in a number of forms — cutlets, croquettes, Newburg — and here in the form the author recommends as the most successful use for a small quantity. Sieved hard-cooked yolk bound with butter was one common alternative to mayonnaise-based fillings, and the diluted beef extract reflects the presence of commercial meat concentrates in late nineteenth-century household seasoning.