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Lobster a La Newburg
1 large lobster. 1 pt. white sauce. Yolks 2 eggs. 1/2 cup wine. 1 can button mushrooms. 1/2 lb. pecans.
When lobster is cooked and cold cut in small pieces. Have white sauce in double boiler, with eggs added to sauce, mushrooms sauted in butter. Put lobster in sauce with mushrooms. Add wine. Season highly, with nuts added last. Serve in toasted bread cups.
A wartime-era, thrifty take on Newburg: the classic cream-and-egg-yolk sauce is built on a pint of white sauce rather than straight cream, and pecans are added for bulk. A few things need translating.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go into the white sauce it must stay below a simmer — the double boiler is doing exactly that job. Stir until the sauce coats a spoon and thickens slightly; if it breaks into curds, it will not come back.
- Temper the yolksThe recipe says simply "with eggs added to sauce." Beat the yolks in a bowl, whisk in a ladle of the hot sauce, then return the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to hot sauce scrambles them.
- White sauceA pint means 2 cups. A standard medium white sauce is roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of milk. For something closer to a true Newburg, make it with half milk and half cream.
- The wineHalf a cup is 4 fl oz, and Newburg is traditionally made with dry sherry or Madeira. Add it off direct heat at the end; the sauce is too gentle to cook out much alcohol, so use something you would drink.
- One large lobsterA 1.5–2 lb lobster yields roughly 1 to 1.5 cups of picked meat, about 6 to 8 oz. Two 1 lb lobsters come to about the same thing. Cut into pieces no smaller than a thumbnail so it does not disappear into the sauce.
- Lobster goes in last, brieflyIt is already cooked. It only needs to warm through — two or three minutes in the hot sauce. Longer and it turns fibrous and squeaky.
- Canned button mushroomsThe can size is not given, and period tins of mushrooms came in several sizes, often only a few ounces drained. Fresh small button or cremini mushrooms, about 8 oz, sautéed in butter until the water has cooked off, are better and closer to what the sauce wants.
- "Season highly"For Newburg that means salt, cayenne or paprika, and a scrape of nutmeg. Be firm with the cayenne; the cream and the nuts flatten it.
- The pecansHalf a pound is a great deal — about two cups, chopped. Half that quantity, toasted first, is plenty unless you want the dish to read as a nut casserole.
- Toasted bread cups and yieldPress crustless slices of bread into muffin tins, brush with melted butter, and bake at 350°F until crisp and golden, about 12–15 minutes. This makes about 6 servings as a lunch dish, 4 as a main.
Lobster Newburg belongs to the world of the late nineteenth-century American luxury restaurant; it is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York, where the story goes that a patron supplied the method and the name was reversed from "Wenberg" to "Newberg" after a falling-out — a tale repeated in almost every cookbook since, and one that should be treated as traditional rather than documented. What is more telling here is the version itself. Mrs. Wilson wrote as a food administrator around the time of the First World War, and her Newburg is the dish adapted to a household budget: white sauce standing in for cream, canned mushrooms rather than fresh, and half a pound of pecans stretching an expensive shellfish across more plates. Serving it in toast cups rather than on a plate is the same instinct — a small quantity of something costly, presented as though there were plenty.