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Lobster Club Sandwiches
Cut meat of a cooked cold or hot lobster in thin slices, place on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, turn well in seasoning, then proceed to finish same as chicken club.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the chicken club entry a few pages earlier. The seasoning is the only thing here that needs a second look.
- What "finish same as chicken club" meansThe reader is sent back to the chicken club entry for the construction: toast, the seasoned meat, and the usual club additions of bacon, lettuce and tomato with butter or mayonnaise. Check that entry for the exact assembly, which this recipe does not restate.
- The saltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon, which would make two roughly half a teaspoon of pepper. With a full teaspoon of salt that is a heavy hand for the meat of a single lobster; season a portion, taste, and add rather than dumping it all in at once.
- Salt and lobsterLobster boiled in seawater or well-salted water is already seasoned through. If your meat came from a shop already cooked, salt very sparingly.
- Slicing the meatThin slices means the tail cut crosswise into medallions, which lie flat and stay put in a stacked sandwich. Claw and knuckle meat is better torn into pieces and scattered, since it will slide out in whole lumps.
- Hot or coldThe original allows either. Warm lobster wilts lettuce and loosens mayonnaise fast, so if you use it hot, build and serve immediately.
- QuantityA 1 1/4 lb lobster yields roughly 4 to 5 oz of picked meat, enough for two sandwiches of this kind.
- BaconIf the chicken club entry calls for bacon, cook it until brittle so it snaps rather than dragging the filling out when the sandwich is bitten.
The club sandwich was already a fixture of American hotel and restaurant menus by the time this book appeared in 1906, and its name is generally traced to the club houses and gentlemen's clubs of the northeastern United States in the 1890s, though no single origin is documented. Alessandro Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, treats it here as a base formula to be varied by filling, which is why the lobster version is so brief: the reader is expected to know the construction and simply swap the meat. By this period lobster was a costly, fashionable restaurant item, which is precisely why it appears in a Delmonico's-derived book.