An Evolutionary Trawl Through The History Of The Lobster Roll
Text by Dana Hatic
Illustration by Dora Dalila Cheffi
I’ll be the first to disclose that my history with seafood is neither vast nor exploratory. Despite growing up in South Florida with abundant access to seafood, I rarely ate it. But on moving to New England in 2012 I felt a mysterious pull to seek out one cuisine in particular: the lobster roll.
Under the shadow of Portland Head Light, Maine’s oldest lighthouse, I sought my first ever lobster roll from a small food truck, but came up against an important choice: hot with butter, or cold with mayonnaise? Little did I know, I had also wandered into a debate built on decades of regional history.
The lobster roll is an illustrious icon of New England cuisine, often eaten outside if procured from a beachside seafood shack or restaurant. Plenty of popular seafood dishes trace their origins back to the region, including fried clams, and lobster rolls are no different.
To learn the true nature of the lobster roll’s appeal, I consulted Kathleen Fitzgerald and Keith Stavely, a wife-and-husband team of scholars and historians who have co-authored three books on New England and American food history. According to Fitzgerald, lobsters have long been a food of necessity and an abundant resource well-documented as such since colonial times. In fact, she says, Massachusetts’ Plymouth Colony founder, Edward Winslow, wrote of “infinite” lobsters at that time, calling them “luscious and delicious.”
“However, they were always secondary to fin fish, and that whole category was below meat, beef and pork,” Fitzgerald says. In the 17th and 18th centuries, lobster was typically used in sauces for other fish like cod or haddock, but leading into the 19th century, people began to make potted lobster as a means of preservation, and it was more often included in fricassee recipes. Yet, per Fitzgerald, people weren’t live-boiling lobster, and certainly didn’t consume it cold.
“By the time you get to the last quarter of the 19th century, there were recipes in almost every cookbook published in the northeast.”
– Keith Stavely
The first recipe for cold lobster salad appeared in ‘The American Frugal Housewife’ cookbook, published in 1829 by Lydia Maria Child, a prominent New England women’s rights activist. Child called for mixing lobster meat with a dressing of egg yolks, oil, vinegar, mustard, and cayenne pepper, along with fine-cut lettuce. Fitzgerald believes that this preparation became a pivotal stepping stone in the evolution of the lobster roll.
Stavely says Child’s cold lobster salad recipe opened the floodgates across the region. “By the time you get to the last quarter of the 19th century, there were recipes in almost every cookbook published in the northeast,” he says. Concurrently, outdoor gatherings and clambakes grew popular in New England’s post-Civil War era, and several magazines from that period published recipes that optimized lobster salad as a filling for portable sandwiches. › “Lobsters have long been a food of necessity and an abundant resource well-documented as such since colonial times.”
“As with many things, the lobster roll specifically, you can’t really pin down a moment in time when it was invented,” says Stavely. But as lobster sandwiches grew in popularity for outdoor gatherings, several societal developments vaulted the humble lobster’s esteem, precipitating new preparations and adaptations of the sandwich. For one, New England saw an increase in trade of lobsters to New York in the mid-19th century, and faster and farther-reaching railway networks boosted tourism in New England, bringing more visitors to the seaside and fueling the popularity of the boardwalk.
“There would be little stands that would sell food served in a way that you could eat while you were walking along,” Stavely says. At the same time, the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis contributed to an increase in the prevalence of portable foods. St. Louis had a large population of German immigrants, who brought along sausages that were served at the fair in a roll of a similar shape. “Hot dog rolls and ice cream cones really took off after the St. Louis World’s Fair,” Stavely says. “At some point in there, somebody got the idea, ‘well, let’s put lobster salad in a hot dog roll’.” In New England, where lobster had become identifiable with leisure, lobster rolls in particular appealed to seaside visitors in the summertime.
Born of convenience and ease, the lobster roll cemented itself as a regional staple in the 1900s, gracing menus at those same seaside food shacks as well as more formal dining establishments across New England and into New York. ‘The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink’ by John F. Mariani describes a mention in the New York Times of lobster rolls served as a “quick lunch delicacy” in Cape Ann, Massachusetts in 1937. The entry also provides details of a restaurant in Connecticut called Perry’s that served a lobster roll with butter-soaked meat sometime in the 1920s, and a New York restaurant that served something more akin to a lobster salad in a heated hot dog roll in the 1960s.
Decades of lobstering built up at-home traditions of lobster boils where families and friends could scavenge the remnants of crustaceans for any leftover meat to turn into lobster salad, and those same traditions of lobstering fuelled the popularity of lobster rolls across the region, from historic beachside seafood shacks to popular restaurants like Eventide.
At that lobster roll truck in Maine, I soaked in the warm weather and the view of Maine’s expansive rocky coast. Faced with choosing hot or cold, buttered or with mayo, I came to terms with the true ease of the decision before me: any lobster roll would be a good lobster roll. This New England icon – rooted in regional traditions and coveted as a symbol of summer and leisure – would be perfect either way.
