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Red Mayonnaise Dressing
Lobster "coral" is powdered to a powder, rubbed through a sieve, and mixed with mayonnaise dressing; this gives a dressing of a bright color or the juice of four boiled beets can be used instead of "coral."
A tinting instruction rather than a full formula: the base mayonnaise is assumed, and this tells you only how to colour it. Two things need clarifying before you start, namely what "coral" is and how much of anything to use.
- What "coral" isThe dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns bright coral-red once the lobster is boiled. It is scraped from the body cavity of a cooked hen lobster; a single lobster yields perhaps a tablespoon or two. Male lobsters have none, so this dressing depends on getting a hen.
- "Powdered to a powder"The coral must be cooked and dry before it will powder. Dry it out on a plate in a low oven or a warm place until it crumbles, then crush it and push it through a fine sieve. Damp coral will only smear and leave grainy specks in the finished dressing.
- Sieving is not optionalUnsieved coral gives a speckled, gritty dressing rather than an even colour. A tamis or fine mesh strainer with the back of a spoon does the work.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Work by eye: begin with a teaspoon of coral powder per cup of mayonnaise, stir, and add more until the colour suits. The coral also contributes a distinct shellfish flavour, which is the point when the dressing is going over lobster salad and a drawback when it is not.
- The beet alternativeJuice from four boiled beets is far more liquid than a spoonful of powder and will slacken and can break a mayonnaise. Reduce the juice in a small pan until it is syrupy and cool it before beating it in, a few drops at a time. It gives colour only, no shellfish character.
- Colour behaviourBeet pigment fades with light, air and warmth; the dressing will look brighter on the first day than the second. Either way, make it the day you serve it.
- The mayonnaise itselfThe book assumes a hand-made mayonnaise on raw yolks. If it is going to sit on a buffet or be served to anyone vulnerable, use pasteurised eggs and keep the bowl cold.
- Yield and useQuantities are left entirely to the cook. Its intended home is cold lobster, crab or shrimp salad, or a plate of hard-boiled eggs, where the pink reads as a signal of what is underneath.
Coloured mayonnaises were a fixture of the elaborate cold table that American and English cookery inherited from nineteenth-century French practice, where a sauce was expected to announce the dish: green with herbs for fish, coral-pink for shellfish, yellow with egg. Lobster coral had long been used both as a colouring and as a thickener, most famously in lobster butter and sauce cardinal, whose name is generally traced to the red of a cardinal's robes. The beet-juice substitute is the tell that this is a domestic book rather than a professional one: it acknowledges that a household cook may not have a hen lobster to hand and offers a vegetable stand-in for the look alone. Turn-of-the-century salad chapters expanded quickly as refrigeration spread, and dressings like this one sat at the point where restaurant garnishing met the home dinner table.