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Chafing-dish Dainties (Cook four or five minutes Add)
and cook four or five minutes. Add the salt, pepper, nutmeg, wine and brandy. Stir the cream into the beaten yolks, and then stir both into the lobster mixture. Serve as soon as the eggs thicken the sauce.
This is the closing half of a chafing-dish lobster Newburg; the opening lines, with the quantities and the initial cooking of the lobster in butter, sit on the previous page. What survives here is the part that decides whether the dish works.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg yolks and cream are the only thickener. Once they go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer and stirred constantly until it coats the spoon, then served immediately, as the recipe directs. On a modern burner use the lowest setting or a bowl over barely steaming water.
- Temper the yolksThe book says to stir the cream into the yolks first, then both into the lobster. That order matters: the cream buffers the yolks so they do not scramble on contact with the hot butter and lobster.
- Wine and brandyThe wine in period Newburg was usually sherry or Madeira, with brandy alongside; the surviving text gives neither type nor quantity. Both go in before the eggs. A chafing dish over an open flame can catch alcohol fumes, so add off the heat if the pan is close to the burner.
- LobsterQuantities are on the missing page. The surviving text implies cooked lobster meat, cut up and already warmed in butter. Canned or frozen lobster meat works but is saltier; hold back on the salt until you taste.
- "Cook four or five minutes"The page opens mid-sentence, so what is being cooked for four or five minutes is on the missing half; it is in any case before the eggs go in, not after. If it is the lobster, that is to heat it and let it take up the butter rather than to cook it further, which turns it fibrous.
- NutmegThe recipe gives no quantity. Grate it fresh and use a small pinch; pre-ground nutmeg from a tin is comparatively flat.
- Yield and servingNo quantities survive on this page, so the yield cannot be given. Serve at once, as the recipe insists; an egg-thickened sauce of this kind does not hold or reheat.
Lobster Newburg belongs to the brief American vogue for cooking at the table, and this book sits squarely in it: the chafing dish let a hostess produce a hot dish in the parlour without a servant carrying plates up from the kitchen. The recipe itself is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and to a sea captain named Ben Wenberg, the story being that the dish was first called Wenberg and the letters reshuffled after a falling-out; the tale is repeated in nearly every account, and its earliest telling comes from within Delmonico's own kitchen, in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), though independent documentation is thin. What is certain is that by the turn of the century the formula — lobster, wine or Madeira, cream and egg yolks, a scrape of nutmeg — had escaped the restaurant entirely and become the standard show-off dish of the chafing-dish manuals, of which this is one.