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Lobster Salad, Mayonnaise
Plunge two live lobsters of two pounds each in a gallon boiling water with a tablespoon salt, boil for twenty minutes, lift up and let thoroughly cool off. Crack and pick out meat from claws and tails, all perfect white meat from bodies, and cut in half-inch-square pieces. Cut also in same size two stalks perfect, white, tender, crisp celery, wash in cold water and carefully drain on a cloth. (It is absolutely necessary that the celery should be as dry as possible.) Place both lobster and celery in quite a large salad bowl, season with three tablespoons dressing, thoroughly mix and give a dome-shaped form. Gently spread a mayonnaise dressing and sprinkle a teaspoon of capers over salad. Cut two hard-boiled eggs in quarters, arrange crown-like over mayonnaise, place six small lettuce leaves around edge of bowl, clean head of one of the lobsters, place in centre of salad and serve.
A restaurant-style composed salad from the era when lobster was still cheap enough to be an everyday luncheon dish. Most of it translates directly; the boiling time and the unnamed "three tablespoons dressing" are the two places to intervene.
- The hinge: dry celeryThe parenthetical warning is the real instruction. Any water clinging to the celery will thin the mayonnaise and slacken the dome within minutes. Cut it, wash it, then spread it on a towel and let it sit while you pick the lobster.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes for a two-pound lobster is long by current practice and gives cottony tail meat. Twelve to fourteen minutes at a hard boil is the usual figure for that weight, counted from the return to the boil.
- Salt in the waterOne tablespoon to a gallon is barely brackish. Water salted to something like seawater strength takes considerably more, on the order of half a cup per gallon, and lobster cooked in well-salted water needs less seasoning afterwards.
- "Three tablespoons dressing"This is almost certainly not the mayonnaise, which is spread on later, but a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing used to season the meat before it is masked. The recipe does not say which dressing is meant. Three tablespoons is about right for this volume of meat and celery.
- Cooling"Let thoroughly cool off" means cool completely, not merely warm. Warm lobster will break the mayonnaise. Chill the picked meat before dressing it, and keep the assembled salad cold until it goes to the table.
- The body meat and the coralThe "perfect white meat from bodies" is the flesh in the leg sockets and along the carcass, worth digging out. The green tomalley and any red coral are not used here; both are traditionally worked into the mayonnaise or saved for a sauce.
- The head garnishThe cleaned head set in the centre is pure period presentation. The recipe says only "clean head," so how much of the shell you leave intact is your own decision. Skip it without loss if it strikes you as morgue-like.
- YieldTwo two-pound lobsters yield roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of picked meat, which serves four as a lunch course or six as part of a larger table.
This comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads exactly like the cold buffet work of that kitchen: cubed meat bound lightly, built into a dome, masked with mayonnaise, then finished with capers, quartered eggs, a collar of lettuce and the lobster's own head as a centrepiece. The building-up of a salad into an architectural shape is often said to have been common in the grand-hotel repertoire of the late nineteenth century, when a dish was expected to be looked at before it was eaten. Lobster salad itself was a fixture of American hotel and steamship menus in this period, helped by the coastal canning and live-shipping trades that made New England lobster reliably available inland. The pairing with celery is generally regarded as an American touch; celery was a prized winter salad vegetable in this period, sold blanched and often served on its own in a cut-glass vase on the table.