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Lobster Salad (Cut the lobster fine then add)
Cut the lobster fine, then add the hearts of two heads of lettuce, break the lettuce fine with the fingers; add the yolks of two hard boiled eggs, and mix all well with mayonnaise dressing.
A terse recipe of the sort written for cooks who already knew what a lobster salad looked like. The gaps are quantities and the dressing, both of which the original assumes.
- How much lobsterNo amount is given. Two 1 1/4 lb hard-shell lobsters yield roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of picked meat, which is about right for the hearts of two lettuces. Ready-picked meat can be substituted by volume.
- "Cut fine" is not shreddedRead it as dicing rather than flaking to threads. Keeping the claw meat in visible chunks and dicing the tail crosswise gives the salad some substance under the dressing.
- The lettuceThe hearts of two heads means the pale inner leaves, probably of romaine or a firm butterhead, the ribs still crisp. The recipe specifies breaking the leaves by hand rather than cutting them, advice often repeated on the grounds that a knife bruises the cut edges.
- The egg yolksThe two hard-boiled yolks go into the salad crumbled, for body and richness; the recipe says nothing about the whites, which are commonly used as a garnish, sliced or chopped over the top. Boil the eggs 10 minutes and cool them fast to keep the yolks from greening.
- Mayonnaise dressingMeant here as the classic uncooked emulsion of raw yolk, oil, vinegar or lemon, and mustard. If you make it at home, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this salad is cooked after the dressing goes in.
- Dress at the last minuteLettuce hearts wilt quickly once mayonnaise is on them. Chill the lobster, eggs and greens separately and combine just before serving.
- ServingThe book gives no presentation. A bowl lined with whole outer lettuce leaves, with sliced egg white or a claw laid on top, suits the dish.
Lobster salad was a fixture of American hotel and club menus through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it had become an expected item in any general household manual's salad chapter. Cheap coastal lobster and the spread of canned lobster meat put it within reach of inland kitchens, while the rise of mayonnaise, which American cookbooks were printing in quantity by the 1880s and 1890s, gave the dish its standard binding. The brevity of the instructions here is itself a period marker, of a kind common in manuals of the era.