ISSUE 23, SALADS, Part 3: Lobster
Lobster Salad
It is an open matter of debate whether it was chicken salad or lobster salad that installed mayonnaise in the hearts of American cooks. The classic lobster salad—sometimes called Philadelphia lobster salad—consists of chunks of poached lobster slathered in scratch made mayonnaise (sometimes with sugar and extra vinegar in the mixture) served on a bed of lettus leaves and dusted with cayenne or paprika. This basic preparation might be tarted up with hard boiled eggs, the boiled claws as visual garnish, and lobster roe. Celery might supplement or supplant the lettuce. Watercress also found its way into the salad bowl. The chunks of lobster meat tended to be sizable.
The lobster salad came into prominence as a caterer’s even dish sometime in the 1830s. Balls, receptions, and large open air convocations with refreshments required ‘cold collations”-pre-prepared foods that could be served at room temperaturew or chilled. The African-American caterer Isaiah LeCount of Philadelphia had made deviled lobster the highlight of society banquest in the 1820s. At about the same time French Chef Bertrand Latouche introduced mayonaise to American diners, popularizing Mayoaise de Voilal3e. Lobster Salad enters American consciousness in newspaper reports of various English Feasts at which it was served in the later 1820s—at the Lord Mayor’s Feast in 1825, a London Horitcultural Society breakfast in 1827, and in memoirs of the famous English caterer, William Kitchener. Bertrand Latouche probably served it during his sojourn in Boston in 1830. An 1832 newspaper essay on the fashionability of dyspepsia in the United States mentions a Boston woman stuffing her gullet with Lobster Salad.
The association of Lobster Salad with women was firmly made when it became linked to lunches and balls. Lunch was a new meal in the mid-19th century, imported from Europe and designed to refresh urban women engaged in city shopping. Lunch Rooms sprang up in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Charleston, and Boston by the 1840s. In New Orleans Miguel Brisolera featured it on his menu at the Phoenix Lunch. [“Phoenix House,” Daily Crescent (May 2, 1850), 3]. Balls invariably featured a refreshment table that stood ready to recharge dancers. It was entirely composed of “cold dishes”—cakes, savory pies, beef tongue, ham, jellies, puddings, and shrimp and lobster salad. It can be said without equivocation that lobster salad had installed itself into the life of the bon ton by the mid 1840s in American cities. Like Oysters, Lobsters were a shippable form of seafood, packed in seaweed, so would appear on a menu at Chicago, St. Louis, or Louisville as well as the coastal cities.
Though not so prone to spoilage as crab (crab salad was a dangerous thing on a ball refreshment table), there was a risk of salmonella or other sort of poisoning if the product had not been carefully handled, or left too warm too long in the open. It was safer than poached fish salads, crab salad, and shrimp salad, but it was not foolproof. Indeed, a newspaper subgenre emerged in the latter 19th century: the cautionary tale of would be high livers who died from eating bad lobster salad. When the lobster palaces—restaurants such as Rector’s in New York catering to stage door johnnies and high stepping women—became a gaudy fixture of urban culture in the Gilded Age, the moral dangerousness of such places got superimposed on the lobster dishes. Bad lobster salad became a divine vehicle of retribution striking down shady men and women.
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