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Lobster Sandwich No. 2
Cut the meat of a cold boiled lobster into dice.
Sprinkle with a little salt, red pepper, and a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar. Add three tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Place mixture on slices of lightly buttered whole wheat or brown bread, cover with another slice of bread, press the two together, remove the crusts, and cut into triangles. Garnish with an olive.
A plain lobster salad sandwich from the era before mayonnaise dominated the genre — the binder here is melted butter, which sets as it cools and holds the dice together. A few of the terms need translating.
- Melted butter is the pointThree tablespoons of melted butter poured over cold lobster will firm up as it chills and helps hold the dice together, though with a tablespoon of vinegar in the mixture it will not set solid. Dress the lobster while the butter is still liquid; chilling the mixture briefly before filling the bread makes it easier to handle.
- "Red pepper"In American books of this period this means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. A pinch is enough for a cup of lobster; it should register as warmth behind the tarragon, not heat.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping a few sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. A tablespoon is assertive against one lobster's worth of meat — add half, taste, then add the rest.
- How much lobsterOne 1 1/4-lb boiled lobster yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of picked meat, which fills about four sandwiches, or sixteen triangles. Claw and knuckle meat dices better than tail; tail meat tends to shred along the grain.
- "Brown bread"Most likely a plain wheatmeal or Graham loaf, since whole wheat is already offered as the alternative; steamed molasses Boston brown bread was also used for sandwiches in American books of the period, so the term is not unambiguous. A firm, thin-sliced whole wheat sandwich loaf is a safe substitute; anything with a coarse open crumb will tear when you press the slices.
- Pressing and cuttingPress the assembled sandwich under a plate for a few minutes before trimming — the butter-set filling compacts and the triangles hold their edges. Trim crusts with a long serrated knife in one draw rather than sawing.
- Keeping and servingCooked lobster in butter is a perishable filling. Assemble no more than a couple of hours ahead, keep the tray covered and cold, and do not leave it standing at room temperature through a long tea.
Sandwich books like this one proliferated between about 1890 and 1920, when afternoon tea and card parties created steady demand for small, crustless, portable food -- hence the trimmed triangles and the single olive. Lobster appears repeatedly in the fish chapters of these collections because canned and freshly boiled lobster were both widely available in the eastern United States by the late nineteenth century. The butter binding is the older technique: potted and buttered shellfish, sealed under fat, long predates the mayonnaise-bound salads that came to dominate sandwich recipes. Tarragon vinegar signals the French-inflected "fancy cookery" fashionable in such books, a shorthand for refinement that cost almost nothing to add.