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Lobster Newburg
If canned lobster is used, use a pound can, separate the pieces carefully and put into the blazer in which two tablespoons of butter have been heated. Thoroughly heat the lobster, and season with one teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt, one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Nutmeg and a few grains of Larkin Cayenne Pepper. Add two eggs well beaten with one-half cup of cream. Stir until the eggs are cooked, and serve at once on toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish, written for a cook standing at the table with an alcohol lamp. The whole thing hangs on the egg and cream: it thickens, it does not scramble.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. A wide, heavy skillet or a saucepan over low heat does the same job; if you are nervous about the eggs, use the top of a double boiler over barely simmering water.
- The hinge: stop before it scrambles"Stir until the eggs are cooked" is misleading if taken literally. Pull the pan off the heat while the sauce still coats the spoon and looks glossy — it will keep setting from residual heat. Once it looks like scrambled eggs it cannot be brought back.
- Larkin productsLarkin Table Salt, Nutmeg and Cayenne were the mail-order house brand this book was written to sell. Any salt and spice will do. Nutmeg grated fresh is noticeably better than the pre-ground tin the original assumed.
- Canned lobsterPound cans of lobster meat were a common grocery item in the period and are now scarce and expensive. A pound of cooked lobster meat -- the picked meat from three or four 1 1/4-lb lobsters -- is the equivalent. Frozen langostino or a good crab meat behaves the same way in the pan, if not quite the same on the palate.
- CreamFor half a cup of cream, use heavy cream. Period "cream" was often thinner than today's heavy cream, but half-and-half or milk will thin the sauce and make curdling more likely, since there is less fat to buffer the eggs.
- No sherryMany Newburg recipes of the period finish with a spoonful or two of sherry or Madeira. Its absence here may reflect the temperance leanings common in American household and promotional cookbooks; a tablespoon of dry sherry added with the cream puts it back.
- Yield and servingA pound of lobster in this sauce serves three or four on toast as a light supper, two if it is the whole meal. Have the toast made and plated first — the sauce will not wait.
Good Things to Eat was one of the premium cookbooks issued by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap manufacturer that grew into a vast mail-order household supplier; recipes doubled as advertising, which is why the salt, nutmeg and cayenne all carry the company name. Lobster Newburg itself is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and to a customer named Ben Wenberg, with the story that the name was reversed to Newburg after a falling-out — a tale repeated so often it should be treated as tradition rather than documented fact. Its appearance in a promotional pamphlet says something about how quickly a restaurant dish could reach the home cook once canned lobster and the chafing dish became household goods.