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Lobster a la Delmonico
2 lb. lobster 1/4 cup butter 3/4 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Slight grating nutmeg 1 cup thin cream Yolks 2 eggs 2 tablespoons Sherry wine Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in small cubes. Melt butter, add flour, seasonings, and cream gradually. Add lobster, and when heated, add egg yolks and wine.
A plain cream-and-sherry lobster from the era when "Delmonico" on a menu meant butter, cream and a wine finish. The whole dish takes about ten minutes once the lobster is picked.
- The hinge: the yolksSlack the yolks with a spoonful of the hot sauce before they go in, then hold the pan below a simmer and stir until it thickens. Boiling after the yolks are added will curdle the sauce past saving.
- A 2 lb lobsterOne 2 lb hard-shell lobster yields roughly 1/2 lb of picked meat, enough for four small servings or two generous ones over toast points or in patty shells. Two 1 lb lobsters give about the same weight of meat with more work.
- The flour quantityAs printed the flour reads 3/4 tablespoon, which will not carry a cup of cream. For a sauce that coats, more flour is wanted; around 3 tablespoons to the 1/4 cup butter will do it, bearing in mind that the egg yolks also thicken at the end.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" in American books of this date is about 18 to 20 percent fat: today's light or single cream, or half-and-half. Heavy cream makes the sauce heavy and dulls the sherry.
- Cayenne and nutmeg"Few grains" is a pinch, perhaps 1/16 teaspoon; the cayenne should register as warmth, not heat. The nutmeg wants to be barely detectable — two or three passes on a fine grater.
- SherryUse a dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry, and add it off the heat with the yolks so the alcohol does not cook away entirely. Cooking sherry is salted and will throw the seasoning off.
- Cooked lobster onlyThe lobster is boiled or steamed and picked before it enters the pan. It only needs to be warmed through — a minute or two in the sauce. Longer and the meat tightens and goes stringy.
- ServingServe immediately in shells, ramekins or on toast. The sauce will not reheat well once the yolks are in it.
Delmonico's in New York, running from the 1830s into the twentieth century, was the restaurant against which American fine dining measured itself, and by 1900 its name was freely borrowed by cookbook writers for dishes that may never have been served on Beaver Street. Lobster was the natural subject. Northeastern lobster had gone from cheap protein to a luxury within living memory of this book's readers, and the standard genteel treatments — Newburg, thermidor, this one — all worked the same way, cutting the meat small and suspending it in something enriched enough to justify the price. The line between lobster Newburg and this recipe is thin to the point of vanishing; Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's own kitchen in the 1870s, and in the versions printed in books of this era the two formulas differ mainly in whether the sherry arrives before or after the cream.