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Lobster Salad
1½ cups diced lobster meat
Mayonnaise
½ cup diced celery
Lettuce
Vinegar
Remove the meat from fresh boiled lobster chilled. Reserve the creamy or green fat, together with the coral. If there are eggs on the tail fins, save them also. Cut the meat not too small. Sprinkle a very little vinegar over the lobster, but keep the celery crisp until it is time to make the salad. Then mix the meat and celery together, stir in enough mayonnaise to moisten and flavor the whole. Arrange the salad on the center of a bed of crisp white lettuce bordered with green lettuce leaves laid under the outer edges. Pour on the remainder of the mayonnaise and sprinkle over it the coral, well pounded, and if liked the eggs and a few capers. Garnish with the claws. Sometimes lettuce leaves are arranged on a platter in cup-like clusters of two or three each, and the salad is divided equally among the clusters. The salad may be served in the cleaned lobster shells.
A plain composed salad that depends entirely on the quality of the lobster and the firmness of the mayonnaise. The one thing to get right is temperature: everything must be cold and dry before it meets the dressing, or the salad weeps.
- How much lobster to buy1½ cups of picked meat is roughly what you get from two 1¼-lb hard-shell lobsters, or one 2-lb. Figure this recipe as two generous or three modest servings.
- Coral and "green fat"The coral is the roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and turning coral red when cooked; a male will have none, so do not plan a garnish around it. The "creamy or green fat" is the tomalley, the hepatopancreas. Public health agencies now advise eating tomalley sparingly, as it concentrates contaminants and shellfish toxins.
- Vinegar on the meat"A very little" is best read as no more than a teaspoon, tossed through; the book does not say which vinegar, so a mild one is the safe choice. It sharpens sweet meat before the mayonnaise coats it, and too much acid will begin to firm the surface of the flesh.
- MayonnaiseThe recipe lists mayonnaise as an ingredient without a recipe, and assumes something thick enough to hold a shape on the spoon. Mayonnaise is uncooked, so if you make your own use pasteurized eggs, especially when serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised. A good jarred mayonnaise loosened with a little lemon juice works.
- Dress at the last minuteThe instruction to keep the celery crisp is the hinge of the recipe. Cut and chill celery and lobster separately, then combine and dress within a few minutes of serving; salt and acid draw water from the celery quickly and thin the dressing.
- The lettuce"Crisp white lettuce bordered with green" means the pale heart leaves of an iceberg or a good head lettuce for the bed, with the darker outer leaves as a frame. Romaine hearts and their outer leaves do the same job.
- Serving in the shellsIf you use the split shells as bowls, scrub and dry them and chill them first. The claws for garnish should be cracked but left whole so they read as decoration rather than as work for the diner.
- Holding timeAssembled salad does not keep. Picked meat can be refrigerated, covered, for a day; dressed salad should be eaten the same hour and never left standing at room temperature.
Lobster salad belongs to the era when lobster had completed its climb from cheap coastal protein and bait to a luxury of hotel dining rooms and ladies' luncheons. Canneries and, later, refrigerated rail cars carried New England lobster inland, and by the time Butterick issued its household books the dish was standard on menus for occasions where a cold buffet was wanted. The elaborate presentation here is characteristic of the period: the food is built up on the platter, framed in lettuce, and finished with the pounded coral and the claws, so that the shellfish is visibly announced. The instruction to keep the celery crisp until the last moment reflects a real kitchen concern of the age.