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Lobster à la Newburg
Melt two tablespoons butter; add one tablespoon flour, one teaspoon salt, few grains cayenne, one cup cream. Cook five minutes; add three egg yolks well beaten, the meat from a two-pound lobster, and just before serving, one third cup each of sherry and brandy.
A chafing-dish sauce built on the same logic as a thin bechamel enriched with yolks. The whole dish stands or falls on heat control after the yolks go in.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the beaten yolks are in, hold the pan below a simmer — around 160-175F. A chafing dish over a spirit lamp made that easy; a modern burner does not, so use the lowest setting or set the pan over barely simmering water.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to "add three egg yolks well beaten" assumes you will do it gradually. Whisk a ladle of the hot cream sauce into the yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan, or you will get sweet scrambled egg.
- Cream means heavy creamPeriod recipes distinguished 'thin' from 'thick' cream, and the richer reading is the safer one here: use heavy or whipping cream. Half-and-half or light cream will not carry the yolks and is more likely to curdle.
- A two-pound lobsterOne live lobster of that size yields about 8 oz of picked meat, near enough 1 1/2 cups. Cook and pick it before you start the sauce; the meat only needs warming through, two or three minutes, or it turns fibrous.
- The liquor is a lotTwo thirds of a cup of spirits total, stirred in just before serving with little chance to cook off, is assertive by current taste. Halving it, or warming the brandy briefly to soften the raw edge, are options -- but note that reducing it on the heat risks breaking the sauce.
- SaltA full teaspoon into one cup of sauce is high, especially with lobster already saline. Start with half and correct at the end.
- Yield and servingServes three as a light main or four to six on toast points, in puff-pastry shells, or over plain rice. Make it immediately before serving; it does not reheat.
Newburg sauce is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where it is said to have been named for a patron called Wenberg and rechristened after a falling-out — a story often repeated, though documented nowhere contemporary to the event. Its appearance here among the chafing dish recipes reflects the fashion of the 1890s and 1900s for the chafing dish as social equipment: a hostess could cook at the table, after the theatre or at a late supper, and lobster with cream, yolks, sherry and brandy was the showpiece of the genre precisely because it demanded attention and rewarded a steady hand. That Lowney's, a chocolate company, printed it at all says something about how far such promotional cookbooks ranged beyond their own product.