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Lobster Newburgh
2 pounds lobster, 1/4 cup Crisco, salt, red pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste, 1 tablespoon sherry, 1 tablespoon brandy, 1/3 cup cream, and 2 egg yolks. Remove cooked lobster meat from shell and cut in slices. Melt Crisco, add lobster and cook 3 minutes. Add salt, red pepper, grated nutmeg, sherry and brandy; cook 1 minute, then add cream and yolks of eggs slightly beaten, and stir until thickened. Serve with toast.
A short, rich chafing-dish sauce whose success rests entirely on heat control. Read the notes on the egg yolks before you start.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the cream and yolks go in, the pan must stay below a simmer or the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks. Pull the pan off the burner, stir the yolks into the cream first, then return it to low heat and stir constantly until it coats the spoon, around 170-175F.
- Crisco means butter hereThe book was issued to promote Crisco, and shortening appears here in place of the butter the dish is normally built on. Newburg is a butter sauce; use 4 tablespoons unsalted butter for the flavour the dish is meant to have.
- "2 pounds lobster" is ambiguousRead as live weight, two pounds gives only about 8 ounces of picked meat, which suits this quantity of sauce. If the original means two pounds of picked meat, the sauce is far too scant. Work to roughly 8 to 10 ounces of cooked meat.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A scant 1/8 teaspoon is enough; it should warm the back of the palate without announcing itself.
- Cream1/3 cup heavy cream. Half-and-half or single cream has too little fat to stabilise the yolks and is likelier to split.
- Sherry and brandyDry or medium sherry, not cream sherry. A tablespoon of each is modest by modern standards; the minute of cooking cooks off the raw edge without reducing the volume much.
- Three minutes is plentyThe lobster is already cooked. The three minutes in fat is to warm it and pick up flavour; longer and it turns fibrous and squeaky.
- Yield and servingServes two generously or four as a first course. Spoon over dry toast points or in puff-pastry cases, and serve at once, as it will not hold or reheat.
Lobster Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and to a customer named Wenberg, whose name the restaurant is said to have reversed after a falling-out; the spelling drifted to "Newburgh" in many later cookbooks, as here. By the time this book appeared, the dish had passed from restaurant showpiece to chafing-dish staple, the sort of thing served at late suppers and card parties because it cooks in five minutes at the table. The Crisco in the ingredient list marks the book's origin as a manufacturer's promotional volume, in which the new hydrogenated shortening was pressed into service even in dishes built on butter.