Home › Salads and Salad Dressing › Lobster Salad
Lobster Salad
Place a live lobster in boiling water, and let it cook for twenty minutes from the time it begins to boil, keeping it covered all the time. A hen lobster will usually be pre ferred on account of its eggs. Thick-shelled fish of medium size have the finest flavor. Remove the meat. Whatever creamy or green fat may be found on the body or cleaving to the shell shouldbe properly reserved, together with the coral. If there are eggs on the tail fins save them also. Cut the meat not too small, and to it allow one-third as much tender white celery cut in pieces the same size. 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, and 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 or bits of beet.
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.
A straightforward composed salad whose success rests almost entirely on not overcooking the lobster. Everything else is assembly.
- Twenty minutes is too longModern practice is about 8 minutes for a 1 lb lobster and 10-12 for a 1.5-2 lb, timed from the return to the boil, then a plunge into ice water. Twenty minutes turns tail meat fibrous and dry, which no amount of mayonnaise will disguise. Use a large pot of heavily salted water so the temperature recovers quickly.
- "Thick-shelled fish"Lobster was routinely called fish in nineteenth-century kitchens. Thick- or hard-shelled means a lobster well past its moult, with meat that fills the shell; new-shell lobsters are watery and light for their size. Judge by weight in the hand.
- Hen lobster and coralThe coral is the roe of a female, black-green when raw and turning bright red-orange when cooked. You may not be able to specify a hen at the fish counter, so treat the coral as a bonus rather than a plan. Dry the cooked coral briefly in a low oven before pounding and it will sieve to a fine powder.
- TomalleyThe "creamy or green fat" is the tomalley, the hepatopancreas. It concentrates contaminants and marine biotoxins, and health agencies in the US and Canada advise against eating it, particularly in quantity. Leave it out and the salad loses nothing structural.
- MayonnaiseThe book's own mayonnaise is a raw-yolk emulsion. Made fresh with pasteurised eggs, or bought, it is fine; either way keep the finished salad refrigerated and serve within a few hours, as dressed shellfish at room temperature is the classic buffet problem.
- ProportionsOne-third celery by volume, cut to the same dice as the lobster, is a good ratio and worth respecting. Dress the lobster with vinegar early, hold the celery dry and cold, and combine only at service so the celery still snaps.
- YieldTwo 1.5 lb lobsters give roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of meat, enough for four as a first course or two as a lunch. Reserve the whole claws before dicing if you want the garnish.
- Beet and capers"Bits of beet" means cooked beetroot, cut small. Add it at the last moment or scatter it on top; stirred through, it bleeds pink into the mayonnaise within minutes.
Lobster salad belongs to the era when American lobster went from cheap coastal protein to a restaurant luxury. Through the mid-nineteenth century canned and boiled lobster was inexpensive along the New England coast; the arrival of rail transport, ice and summer hotels turned it into the centerpiece of the ladies' luncheon and the wedding supper, and by the 1890s a lobster salad on a bed of lettuce was a standard sign that a table was being set with some ambition. The pairing with celery is characteristic of the period — celery was itself a slightly fashionable vegetable, served at table in tall glass vases — and the elaborate finish here, with sieved coral, capers, beet and the claws laid around the edge, is of a piece with the era's instruction in how things ought to look. The identification of the coral as the chief reason to prefer a "hen lobster" was a commonplace of nineteenth-century cookery writing, repeated from book to book.