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Lobster Sandwiches
Remove lobster meat from shell, and chop. Season with salt, cayenne, made mustard, and lemon juice; or moisten with any salad dressing. Spread mixture on a crisp lettuce leaf, and prepare as other sandwiches.
Fannie Farmer assumes you already know how to build a sandwich, so this reads as a filling formula rather than a recipe. The only real decisions are how much lobster you have and how wet you let the dressing get.
- "Made mustard"This means prepared mustard from a jar, as opposed to dry mustard powder. Any smooth Dijon or yellow mustard works; use it sparingly so it does not bury the lobster.
- "Any salad dressing"At the time this covered the period dressings: mayonnaise, the cooked "boiled" dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar, cream dressing, or French dressing. Bottled sweet dressings are a poor substitute here; mayonnaise with a squeeze of lemon is closer to the intent.
- How much lobsterA 1 1/4-lb hard-shell lobster yields roughly 1/4 lb of picked meat, about a cup, enough for three or four small sandwiches. Chop it rather than shred it, and keep a few larger pieces of claw meat for texture.
- Seasoning by tasteNo quantities are given. Bind with a few tablespoons of mayonnaise per cup of meat, adding mustard and lemon juice a little at a time and cayenne a pinch at a time, tasting as you go.
- Keep the dressing tightLobster releases water as it sits in an acidic dressing. Mix and fill close to serving, and drain the meat well after chopping, or the bread will go through.
- The lettuce does workThe leaf sits between the mixture and the bread, which helps keep moisture off the crumb, though the recipe does not say that is why it is there. Use a firm inner romaine or iceberg leaf trimmed to the shape of the bread.
- "Prepare as other sandwiches"Elsewhere in this chapter that means thin slices of day-old bread, crusts trimmed, lightly buttered on the cut face, cut in triangles or fingers and covered with a damp cloth until served.
- Cold chainDressed shellfish is a classic buffet risk. Hold the filling and the finished sandwiches refrigerated and do not leave them out more than a couple of hours.
Fannie Farmer's sandwich chapter reflects the late-nineteenth-century vogue for the dainty afternoon sandwich, served at teas, receptions and card parties, where the point was thin bread, trimmed crusts and a well-seasoned bound filling rather than a substantial meal. The instruction to "prepare as other sandwiches" is characteristic of the book's method-first approach: teach the technique once, then vary the filling, which is exactly why the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book worked so well as a teaching text.