Eliza Acton’s recipe for lobster salad is contemporary with Gilbert & Sullivan’s Thespis.

Lobster Salad. First, prepare a sauce with the coral of a hen lobster, pounded and rubbed through a sieve, and very gradually mixed with a good mayonnaise, remotdade (remoulade), or English salad-dressing of the present chapter. Next, half fill the bowl or more with small salad herbs, or with young lettuces finely shred, and arrange upon them spirally, or in a chain, alternate slices of the flesh of a large lobster, or of two middling-sized ones, and some hard-boiled eggs cut thin and evenly. Leave a space in the centre, pour in the sauce, heap lightly some small salad on the top, and send one immediately to table. The coral of a second lobster may be intermingled with the white flesh of the fish with very good effect; and forced eggs…may be placed at intervals round the edge of the bowl as a decoration, and excellent accompaniment as well. Another mode of making the salad is to lay the split bodies of the fish round the bowl, and the claws, freed carefully from the shells, arranged high in the centre on the herbs; the soft part of the bodies may be mixed with the sauce when it is liked; but the colour will not be good.

See Eliza Action. Modern Cookery, for Private Families: Reduced to a System of Easy Practice, in a Series of Carefully Tested Receipts, in which the Principles of Baron Liebig and Other Eminent Writers Have Been as Much as Possible Applied and Explained (1845, 1860 rev. ed.)