No. 795

Lobster Mayonnaise Printaniere

Homard Mayonnaise Printaniere

Select a freshly cooked and heavy lobster, cut up the meat taken from the tail and claws into slices, and dress them crown shaped on a side dish, and garnish the center with the green creamy part from the body. Prepare a mayonnaise sauce (No. 606) with some chervil, tarragon and lobster coral, all chopped up finely, cover the whole of the lobster with the mayonnaise and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's assembly dish rather than a cooked one: the work is in the lobster, the herbs and the chill. Two details in Ranhofer's shorthand need translating before you start.

"Heavy" lobsterA heavy lobster for its length is one that has not recently moulted, so the shell is full of meat rather than water. A 1 1/2 to 2 lb hard-shell lobster gives roughly 6-8 oz of picked tail and claw meat, enough for two as a side dish.
Coral and tomalleyThe coral is the roe, found only in females; it is dark green raw and turns bright red when cooked, which is what gives the sauce its colour. The "green creamy part from the body" is the tomalley, the hepatopancreas. It concentrates contaminants from the water, so it is best used sparingly and avoided altogether by children and anyone pregnant.
Sauce No. 606Ranhofer's mayonnaise is a standard one along the usual lines: egg yolks, vinegar or lemon, oil beaten in slowly, and seasoning. Since it is never cooked, use pasteurised eggs or a good bought mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice, then fold in the chopped herbs and pounded coral.
Chervil and tarragonThese are the point of the dish and not interchangeable with parsley. Chop them just before folding in; tarragon in particular goes muddy and bitter if it sits bruised in an acid sauce for hours.
Dressing it crown shapedCut the tail into neat medallions across the grain, keep the claw meat whole where you can, and stand the slices leaning against each other in a ring on a chilled dish, tomalley mounded in the middle. The mayonnaise should be stiff enough to coat rather than pool.
Temperature and timingEverything wants to be cold. Cook and cool the lobster in advance, but sauce it no more than half an hour before it goes to table, or the mayonnaise slackens on the meat and the herbs lose their colour.

A Little History

Printanière simply means "in the spring manner", and in nineteenth-century French kitchens it signalled the first green things of the year: here chervil and tarragon, chopped raw into the sauce rather than cooked. The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the food he served during three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style clearly enough — a luxury ingredient handled simply, built up into a shape on the dish, and finished with a sauce carrying the colour of the same animal. Cold lobster dressed with mayonnaise was a fixture of the American restaurant buffet and the summer collation in this period, when ice was reliably available to city kitchens and cold side dishes could be held on the sideboard through a long service. The trick of pounding the coral into the sauce, which tints it coral-pink and deepens the flavour, is older than Ranhofer and appears across the French repertoire in sauces for fish.