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Lobster Sandwich No. 3
Pound the meat of a medium sized lobster fine, add one tablespoonful of the coral, dried and mashed smooth, the juice of half a lemon, a dash of nutmeg, one-fourth teaspoonful of paprika, and two tablespoonfuls of soft butter. Mix all to a smooth paste and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A potted-lobster paste in the Edwardian tea-sandwich style: nothing is cooked here, so the whole thing depends on starting with properly cooked lobster and good butter.
- The lobster is already cookedThe book assumes you begin with a boiled lobster. It specifies only "medium sized"; meat from a freshly cooked or reliably chilled lobster of about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb should give somewhere around 5 oz of picked meat, tail, claws and knuckles together.
- Coral, and where to find itCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red once cooked. Only hens have it, so a tablespoonful is not guaranteed from any given lobster. The recipe wants it dried — spread it on a plate in a low oven or a warm spot until crumbly, then mash it smooth with the back of a spoon. Without it the paste is paler and blander but still works.
- Pounding versus processingA mortar was the original tool and it gives a paste with some fibre left in it. A food processor will do the job in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the meat turns to a gummy purée.
- Butter temperature is the hinge"Soft butter" means genuinely soft, at about 65F, not melted. Melted butter separates as the paste chills and the sandwiches turn greasy. Beat it into the lobster last, off the heat and off the ice.
- PaprikaIn American cookery of this period paprika generally meant sweet Hungarian pepper, used as much for colour as for heat. Smoked Spanish paprika will bulldoze the lobster; use sweet.
- NutmegA dash means a few scrapes from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and much easier to overdo — keep it to a pinch.
- Bread and assemblyThin-sliced white bread, lightly buttered on the facing sides so the filling does not soak in, crusts trimmed after cutting. Chill the paste for half an hour before spreading; it firms up and the sandwiches cut cleanly.
- Yield and keepingEnough filling for perhaps 6 to 8 rounds, cut into small sandwiches. Cooked shellfish paste should be used the day it is made and kept refrigerated until serving.
Sandwich books proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1920, driven by the afternoon tea and the card party — a genre in which one modest idea, the filling, could be rung through a hundred variations, hence a "Lobster Sandwich No. 3." The pounded-shellfish-and-butter paste behind it is much older, descending from English potted fish, where the butter both bound the mixture and sealed it from air. The use of the coral as a seasoning and a colouring agent belongs to the same tradition: nineteenth-century cookbooks routinely had cooks dry and sieve lobster coral, sometimes working it into a compound "lobster butter" for sauces and garnishes. Lobster's presence in a book of everyday sandwiches is itself a period marker — the Atlantic fishery and refrigerated rail freight had by then turned what colonial New England is often said to have regarded as poor man's food into something a hostess could put on a tea tray.