No. 2638

Lobster or Spiny Lobster Salad, American Style

Salade de Homard ou de Langouste a l'Americaine

Cook two medium lobsters weighing three pounds each, let get cold, then break the shells and remove the meat from the tails and claws, cutting it into five-eighth inch dice; season all with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar and mustard, and let macerate for half an hour. Drain, and range them in a salad bowl over a bed of white and well-seasoned lettuce leaves; dress it dome-shaped, and cover the surface with a firm and consistent mayonnaise (No. 606); decorate with the lobster claw, hard-boiled eggs, olives, capers, beets and pickled cucumbers, laying on the extreme top a pretty white lettuce head.

← No. 2637 Lamb Salad a la Somer Cooked Salads No. 2639 Mazarin Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's salad is an assembly job: the work is in cooking the lobster correctly and in a mayonnaise stiff enough to hold its shape on a mound. A few of his assumptions need translating.

The hinge: do not overcook the lobsterTwo three-pound lobsters need roughly 20-25 minutes in hard-boiling salted water, not the long boil older kitchens gave them. Pull them when the tail meat is just opaque and cool them quickly, since carryover heat in a shell that size will keep cooking the meat.
Homard and langousteHomard is the clawed American or European lobster; langouste is the spiny or rock lobster, which has no claws. If you use spiny lobster you get tail meat only, and the claw called for in the garnish will not exist or a whole tail shell can stand in its place.
Quantity and yieldSix pounds of live lobster yields roughly 1.5-2 lb of picked meat, enough for six to eight as a first course or four as a lunch main.
The macerationThe half hour in oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper is a marinade, not a dressing about 3 tablespoons oil to 1 of vinegar with a teaspoon of mustard is right for this quantity. Drain it properly afterwards or the mayonnaise will slide off and pool in the bowl.
Mayonnaise No. 606Ranhofer's mayonnaise is the classic egg-yolk and oil emulsion, and "firm and consistent" means stiff enough to stand keep the oil ratio high and do not thin it. Since it is served uncooked, use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise stiffened with a little extra oil if you are serving anyone vulnerable.
The diceFive-eighths of an inch is large enough that the lobster reads as lobster, small enough to pack into a dome. Cut the tail into medallions first, then dice; the recipe dices the claw meat with the rest.
Building the domeThe salad is meant to be built and coated shortly before service. A bed of dry, crisp lettuce underneath, the dressed meat mounded over it, then the mayonnaise masked over the surface like a glaze, then the garnishes pressed on in a pattern.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's for some three decades in New York, in two separate spells rather than one continuous stretch, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in French-titled order. What "American style" means here the book does not say, and the term had other uses in the period; what the dish plainly is is a cold composed salad dressed in the round, masked with mayonnaise and decorated with hard-boiled egg, beet, caper and olive, a style of presentation that dominated hotel dining rooms on both sides of the Atlantic through the late nineteenth century. By the time Ranhofer was writing, lobster had already made its passage from a food of the poor to a priced luxury of the hotel table, a transformation that happened largely within his own working lifetime; salads of this kind, elaborately dressed and served cold from the larder, were part of what made that transformation stick.