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Lobster Newburg
1/2 pint (I cup) cream 3 egg yolks I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter 1 wineglassful sherry wine Salt and red pepper to taste Take the meat from a boiled lobster and cut it into dice; sauté it in the butter, then add the seasonings, sherry wine, and the yolks of eggs mixed with the cream.
Stir until the mixture begins to thicken, then remove it from the fire and serve at once in hot ramequins.
A simple egg-yolk sauce that lives or dies by temperature control. Everything else in the recipe is negotiable; the heat is not.
- The hinge: never let it boilThree yolks in a cup of cream will break if the pan is allowed to come to a simmer. Work over low heat or, better, a bowl set over barely steaming water, and pull it off while it still coats the spoon loosely — it thickens further off the heat.
- A wineglassfulRoughly 2 fl oz (1/4 cup) in period usage, though the measure was never standardised. Use a dry sherry — amontillado or a fino; cream sherry makes the dish cloying.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chili flakes. A scant 1/8 teaspoon is enough to register; Newburg should taste warm rather than hot.
- How much lobsterNo quantity is given. Two 1 1/4-lb lobsters yield roughly 1 1/2 cups of picked meat, which is about the right proportion for a cup of cream. Frozen lobster tail works, thawed and patted dry so it does not water the sauce.
- Sauté brieflyThe lobster is already cooked. A minute or two in the butter to warm it through and take up the flavour is all it needs; longer turns the meat fibrous.
- RamequinsSmall individual ceramic dishes — what we now call ramekins. Warm them in a low oven first, since the sauce cools fast and cannot be reheated without breaking.
- YieldFour small first-course portions, or two as a light main course with toast points or rice.
Lobster Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where it is said to have been introduced by a sea captain named Ben Wenberg and renamed after a falling-out with the management — a story that has never been fully documented. Whatever its origin, the dish became the standard of chafing-dish and ramekin cookery: rich, quick, made at table or nearly so, and dependent on cream, butter, yolks and sherry rather than on any long process. Its presence in a casserole-cookery book of this era reflects the vogue for individual portions served in small ceramic dishes.