Fine Lobster Salad - (This Is For Com-Pany)

Boil eight eggs for ten minutes, or till quite hard. Lay them in cold water, or cool them by laying bits of ice among them. When quite cold, cut each egg lengthways into four or six pieces, taking a bit off one end of each piece or slice. Cut up into long pieces the best part of a fresh lettuce, that has just been washed in a pan of cold water. Lay the lettuce in a dish, and surround it closely with the pieces of egg standing up on their blunted ends, with the yolk side outward, and forming a handsome wall all round the bed of lettuce. Upon this, pile neatly the bits of chopped lobster, finishing with the small claws stuck into the top. Have ready the dressing in a sauce-tureen. Make it of the beaten yolks of two raw eggs, and four table-spoonfuls of sweet oil, thickened with the mashed coral of the lob ster, and the crumbled yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, and season slightly with a little salt, cayenne, and a spoonful of tarragon mustard. Finish with two table-spoonfuls of vinegar, and stir the whole hard with a box-wood spoon or fork.

Send it to table with the sauce-tureen, along with the dish of lobster, etc. Pour on each plate of lobster a portion of this dressing. Or, if you can obtain no lettuce, mix this dressing at once with the chopped meat of the lobster. Smooth it in a pile on the dish, (keeping it towards the centre) and stand up the slips of hard egg handsomely surrounding it - the small claws decorating the top.

Lobster Rissoles

Extract all the meat from the shells of one or two boiled lobsters. Mince it very fine; the coral also. Season it with a little salt and cayenne, and some powdered mace and nutmeg. Add about a fourth part of finely grated bread-crumbs; and with a sufficiency of fresh butter or a little finely-minced veal suet, or some sweet oil, make it up into balls or cones. Brush them over with yolk of egg, dredge them lightly with flour, and fry them in lard. Introduce them as a side dish at a dinner party, or as an accompaniment to salmon.

This mixture may be baked in puff-paste as little patties, or you may bake in a soup-plate an empty shell of paste, and when done, (having stewed the rissole mixture made moist) fill the cold paste with it, and serve it up as a lobster pie.

In buying lobsters, choose those that are the heaviest and liveliest, or quickest in their motions when touched. They are then fresh. The hen has the broadest tail and the softest fins.

Lobster Pudding

Take the empty back shell of one large boiled lobster, and all the best meat of two. Clean out the shell very nicely; washing it, and wiping it dry. Mince the meat, and mash the coral with it; adding half a dozen yolks of hard-boiled eggs crumbled among it, and season it well with powdered mace and nutmeg, and a little cayenne. Moisten it all through with plenty of sweet oil, and the raw yolks of one or two eggs, well beaten. Fill the shell with this pudding, and cover the surface of the mixture with a coating of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Brown it by holding over it a salamander, or a red hot fire-shovel. Send it to table in the shell, laid on a china dish.

Small puddings may be made as above, of crab-meat put into several large crab-shells, and placed side by side on a dish.

They may be eaten either warm or cold; and they look well with green lettuce or pepper-grass, disposed fancifully among them.