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Lobster Salad, Rae
Split lengthwise two medium-sized, freshly boiled and cooled lobsters, crack claws, carefully pick out meat from shells of bodies and claws, remove intestines and pouch, then cut meat into rather small, equal, square pieces and place in a salad bowl. Peel and chop up fine as possible two very small, sound shallots, add to lobster and mix a little. Finely chop up three cold hard-boiled eggs, add to lobster and gently shuffle contents of bowl. Chop very fine a root well-pared and thoroughly cleaned celery, using nothing but the white, thoroughly drain in a napkin and add to bowl, with a light teaspoon finely chopped parsley and half teaspoon finely chopped chives (if handy). Season with two teaspoons salt, a teaspoon very finely and freshly crushed white pepper, three and a half tablespoons dressing, mix well, and just before sending to table add three good tablespoons freshly prepared mayonnaise. Gently mix the whole well together, neatly wipe edges of salad bowl with a napkin and serve.
A straightforward composed lobster salad; the only real difficulties are two vague measures and a salt figure that reads high to modern palates.
- Lobster quantityThe recipe gives no weights. Two 'medium' lobsters of around 1 1/4 lb each would yield somewhere in the region of 8-12 oz of picked meat. Cooked lobster meat bought by weight works equally well.
- "Remove intestines and pouch"The intestine is the dark vein running the length of the tail; the pouch is the gritty stomach sac just behind the eyes. Both come out easily. The green tomalley and any red coral are edible and can be worked into the mayonnaise rather than discarded.
- The celery"A root well-pared... using nothing but the white" most likely means a head of celery trimmed down to the pale inner heart rather than celeriac, though the wording is not conclusive. Blanched celery was usual in this period and modern celery is greener and stringier, so peel the outer ribs and use only the tender core.
- "Three and a half tablespoons dressing"In a book of this vintage, plain "dressing" listed alongside a separate mayonnaise probably means an oil-and-vinegar French dressing, used to season and moisten the meat before the mayonnaise binds it. Around three parts oil to one of vinegar, lightly seasoned, is a common proportion of the period.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for a pound of lobster is a great deal, particularly with boiled-in-seawater shellfish and a salted mayonnaise on top. Start with half a teaspoon, taste after the dressing goes in, and adjust.
- Shallots"Two very small" means a total of about a tablespoon chopped. Modern shallots are often large enough that one lobe is plenty; raw allium overwhelms lobster quickly.
- Order of workThe instruction to add the mayonnaise only "just before sending to table" is the one that matters. Dressed early, the salad weeps and the mayonnaise slackens into a pink puddle. Combine everything else, chill, and fold in the mayonnaise at the last minute.
- DrainingWringing the chopped celery in a napkin is not fussiness; celery water thins and slackens the dressing. A clean kitchen towel or several squeezes in paper towel does the same job.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two lobsters would reasonably serve about four as a first course or lunch dish, two as a main. Serve cold.
Lobster salad belongs to the late nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant repertoire, when improved rail transport of live and boiled lobster in ice made the shellfish a fixture on American and European menus well inland. The construction here, with its chopped hard-boiled egg, minced celery heart and finishing spoonfuls of mayonnaise, is squarely in the French professional tradition, and the personal name in the title may mark an author, contributor or source rather than anything about the dish itself. The particular care over the napkin work, the wiped bowl rim and the mayonnaise added at the last possible moment marks it as service cooking rather than home cooking, written by someone used to sending plates out of a kitchen.