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Lobster with Mushrooms
Melt three tablespoons butter; add one cup fresh mushrooms, cut in slices, few drops onion juice, two tablespoons flour, one cup cream or chicken stock; meat from a two-pound lobster and salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste. Serve when hot.
A chafing-dish newburg in all but name, written for a cook who already knew that the lobster went in last. The instructions read as a shopping list; the order matters more than the text lets on.
- The hinge: add the lobster at the endThe lobster is already cooked — the recipe assumes a boiled two-pound lobster picked out of the shell. Build and thicken the sauce first, then fold in the meat and heat it only until warmed through, a minute or so. Held over heat it turns stringy and dry.
- Order of operationsMelt the butter, cook the sliced mushrooms until their liquid has released and mostly evaporated, then stir in the flour and cook it a minute before the cream goes in. Adding flour to wet mushrooms gives a pasty, raw-tasting sauce.
- How much lobsterA two-pound lobster yields roughly 6 to 8 ounces of picked meat, on the order of 1 to 1½ cups. About that quantity of cooked lobster meat from any source will do.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and squeeze the pulp, or press a slice in a garlic press. A few drops is a very small amount, well under a quarter teaspoon — enough to season, not to taste of onion.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons flour to one cup liquid is a medium white sauce, thick enough to coat. Cream gives the richer, more traditional result; chicken stock makes a lighter dish that will want a little more salt.
- Chafing-dish heatThe recipe does not specify equipment. If you happen to be using a chafing dish, the roux and sauce can be made in the blazer over the flame, with the water pan slid underneath before the lobster goes in. On a stove, a heavy saucepan over low heat does the same job.
- Yield and servingEnough for three or four as a supper dish. Nothing is said about how to serve it; toast points, patty shells or crackers would all be usual for the period, as would a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of sherry off the heat.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company. The chafing dish was fashionable in American middle-class homes in this period: it let a hostess cook at the table, without a servant and without the kitchen range, which suited late suppers after the theatre or cards, and creamed lobster spiced with cayenne was among the dishes associated with it. This formula is close kin to lobster à la Newburg, though it has neither the sherry nor the egg yolks that define Newburg proper; that family of dishes is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s. Commercial mushroom cultivation in the United States was expanding in these years, having taken hold in the 1890s.