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Lobster Salad Sandwich
Mix one cup of lobster meat with a little mayonnaise dressing. Marinate crisp lettuce leaves and arrange on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread; cover with lobster, and cover lobster with bread; sprinkle lobster coral on top. Prepare just before serving.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know two things a modern cook may not: what "marinate" means when applied to lettuce, and where lobster coral comes from.
- The hinge: assemble at the last minuteThe instruction to prepare just before serving is the whole technique. Dressed lobster and marinated lettuce both release liquid, and thin buttered bread will go soggy quickly. Mix the filling ahead, chill it, and build the sandwiches as they go to the table.
- "Marinate" the lettuceIn period usage this means tossing the leaves briefly in French dressing — oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — and draining them, not soaking them. A minute is enough. Shake or blot the leaves before they meet the butter, which is there specifically to waterproof the bread.
- How much lobsterOne cup of picked meat is roughly 5 to 6 ounces, which is the yield of a single 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb lobster, or two good tails. Two to three tablespoons of mayonnaise is plenty; the dressing should coat, not pool.
- Lobster coralCoral is the roe, found only in females, and it is dark green-black when raw and bright red only after cooking. If your lobster comes ready-picked you will very likely have none. Sieved hard-boiled egg yolk, sometimes with a pinch of paprika, is a period-appropriate stand-in for the colour.
- Mayonnaise then and nowThe book assumes a hand-made mayonnaise built on raw yolk. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is acidified and made with pasteurised egg, and works perfectly here; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the filling refrigerated until assembly.
- The bread'Thin slices of white bread' points to a fine-crumbed sandwich loaf, cut as thin as it will hold together; the recipe says nothing about crusts, though tea-table versions were usually trimmed. Butter should be soft enough to spread without tearing — leave it out for half an hour rather than warming it.
- YieldEnough for three or four full sandwiches, or about a dozen quarters if you cut them into fingers or triangles.
- Keeping it coldCooked lobster in mayonnaise is a classic vehicle for spoilage bacteria. Keep the mixture below 40F until the moment of assembly, and do not leave finished sandwiches sitting out for more than an hour or two.
Sandwich cookery attracted its own books and pamphlets in America around the turn of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, the card party and the packed "box luncheon" all wanted small things that could be made in quantity. Lobster salad was a fixture of hotel and club menus in the later nineteenth century, and canned lobster from Maine and the Maritime provinces had already put lobster within reach of households nowhere near the coast, though the Maine canning trade was in sharp decline by 1900. The insistence on coral as a garnish reflects the era's taste for colour on a pale plate, alongside paprika, sieved egg yolk and chopped parsley.