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Lobster a La Newburg
Two tablespoons of butter, and when this melts, stir in the meat of a large boiled lobster, cut (not chopped) into large dice. Season with cayenne, a pinch, and stir until very hot. Then add a cup of cream into which a pinch of baking powder has been stirred, and when very hot, stir in gradually the beaten yolks of three eggs. Stir for two minutes, and then add a wineglass of sherry wine and
— Mrs. Willard E. Myers
serve.
A short, fast pan sauce that lives or dies on heat control. Everything here is straightforward except the egg yolks, which will scramble if the pan gets away from you.
- The hinge: keep the cream below a simmerOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must never bubble. Hold it around 160-175F, off the direct flame if need be, and stir constantly; it should thicken to a coating consistency in the two minutes given. If it looks grainy, it has gone too far.
- A wineglass of sherryIn American cookbooks of this era a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. Use a dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry, and add it off the heat so the residual warmth cooks off the harshness without breaking the sauce.
- The pinch of baking powderPresumably insurance against curdling; older cooks added a trace of soda or powder to cream for this reason, though baking powder is a balanced acid-plus-bicarbonate mix and its effect here is far less clear-cut than plain soda's. A pinch means a pinch; more will taste soapy.
- Lobster quantity"A large boiled lobster" of about 2 lb yields roughly half a pound of picked meat. Cut, as instructed, rather than chopped -- clean dice hold their shape, while chopped meat sheds shreds that cloud the sauce.
- Do not cook the lobster twiceThe meat is already cooked. It needs only to be warmed through in the butter, a minute or so; longer and it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- CreamUse heavy cream, 36% fat or above. Half-and-half and modern ultra-pasteurized light cream are far more prone to breaking at this temperature.
- Yield and servingEnough for perhaps two or three as a light main course, three or four as a first course. It was traditionally spooned over toast points, in puff-pastry shells, or on plain boiled rice, and it does not hold -- serve the moment it thickens.
Lobster Newburg belongs to the late nineteenth-century American restaurant repertoire, and its origin is usually traced to Delmonico's in New York, where the dish is said to have been named for a patron — the story generally told is that the name was reversed from Wenberg to Newburg after a falling-out. Whatever the truth of that, the formula spread quickly through the chafing-dish craze of the 1890s and 1900s, when cream, egg yolks, sherry and cayenne over a spirit lamp counted as the height of informal entertaining.