Lobster and lettuce? (British food Q)

[StarvingButStrong]

In ep. 2 of the Masterpiece Theater’s production of “Bleak House,” one smarmy young lawyer takes a newcomer to the firm off to a nearby restaurant and orders “Lobster and lettuce” for the both of them.

Unfortunately they don’t show the food being delivered, because I’m curious as to what this is. The way Mr. Guppy rattled off the order it sounded like a well established pairing, like ordering, oh, ‘a burger and fries’ but I’d never come across it before despite many many years of reading English mysteries and watching English series.

So, is it the obvious, something like chunks of lobster served on a bed of lettuce, like a salad? Or it is one of those dishes (Toad in a Hole, Bubble and Squeak) that have the nonsensical names Brits seem to go in for?

[Captain_Amazing]

Specifically, from Chapter 20 of Bleak House:

So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted.

It’s what it sounds like…a lobster salad.

[Captain_Amazing]

If you want a contemporary recipe, here it is (from the 1832 cookbook “Seventy Five Recipies for Pasrry Cakes and Sweetmeats”):

Take two large boiled lobsters. Extract all the meat from the shell, and cut it up into very small pieces.

For lobster salad, you must have lettuce instead of celery. Cut up the lettuce as small as possible.

Make a dressing as for a chicken-salad, with the yolks of nine hard-boiled eggs, half a pint of sweet oil, half a pint of vinegar, a gill of mustard, a tea-spoonful of cayenne, and a tea-spoonful of salt. Mix all well together with a wooden spoon.

A few minutes before it is to be eaten, pour the dressing over the lobster and lettuce and mix it very well.

[StarvingButStrong]

@Captain Amazing

It’s what it sounds like…a lobster salad.

How boring.

But thank you for fighting ignorance yet again.

[alphaboi867]

Wasn’t lobster considred only fit for the poor during that era?

[Captain_Amazing]

Lobster was only ever really seen to be a “poor man’s food” in New England, because lobsters were so common Even at that point, they were still popular among the upper class in England. And by the 1830s-40s, they were really popular food, and had lost the stigma they had had earlier.