Barney Bernard
Add three eggs, a little water and salt and pepper to taste.
Chop all together, dip into cracker dust and mould into balls.
Fry in chicken fat until brown. very JuneyJus.
Barney Bernad.
FRICASSEE OF LOBSTER AND MUSHROOMS
2-pound lobster I 1/4 cup butter 3/4 pound mushrooms Few drops onion juice 2 tablespoons sherry wine 1/4 cup flour 1½ cups milk Salt Paprika Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in strips.
Cook butter with mushrooms broken in pieces and onion juice three minutes; add flour, and pour on milk gradually. Add lobster meat, season with salt and paprika, and, as soon as lobster is heated, add wine. Remove to serving dish, and garnish with puff paste or toast points and parsley.
Yours happily,
Two dishes sit on this page: a fried ball of chopped meat bound with egg and cracker crumbs, and a complete lobster fricassee that reads like standard Boston-school cookery of the 1910s. The fricassee is the one you can follow start to finish.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth. A few drops carry a surprising amount of flavour; whole minced onion will not dissolve into the sauce in three minutes.
- Cracker dustPlain soda crackers or water biscuits crushed to a fine crumb. Modern dry breadcrumbs work, but they brown faster than cracker crumb, so watch the fat.
- Chicken fatRendered schmaltz, sold in tubs or rendered at home from skin and trimmings. It smokes lower than a neutral oil, so keep the pan at a steady medium rather than pushing it hot.
- The sauce ratioA quarter cup flour to a cup and a half milk gives a thick binding sauce rather than a pouring cream, though it is still looser than a croquette base. If you want it looser still, add milk a spoonful at a time after the lobster goes in.
- Do not cook the lobster twiceThe lobster meat comes out of a shell it has already been boiled in. It goes into the finished sauce only to warm through, a minute or two. Held longer over heat it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- Sherry last, off the boilThe wine is added after the lobster is hot and immediately before serving, so it stays aromatic. Boiling it down flattens it into something dull and vaguely sweet.
- Puff paste garnishBaked puff pastry crescents or fleurons, made separately and set around the dish. Frozen all-butter puff pastry cut in shapes and baked at 400F is the direct equivalent; toast points are the plainer option the recipe already allows.
- YieldA 2-pound lobster yields roughly half a pound of picked meat, which with the mushrooms and sauce serves four as a lunch or first course, two as a main.
Barney Bernard was a vaudeville and Broadway comedian best remembered as Abe Potash in the Potash and Perlmutter plays, and celebrity cookbooks of this kind traded on exactly that kind of recognition: a signature, a scrap of a favourite dish, and a genial closing line. The pairing here is telling. Frying in rendered chicken fat and binding with cracker crumb belongs to the Jewish immigrant kitchens of New York's Lower East Side, where butter would not be used in a meat dish; the lobster fricassee, by contrast, is pure Anglo-American chafing-dish cookery, the sort of thing taught in cooking schools and served at supper after the theatre. Both would have been familiar to a Broadway performer.