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Lobster and Other Sea Fish (Remove the carrot add the wine)
Remove the carrot; add the wine, lobster and seasonings. When thoroughly heated, add the butter, parsley and brandy and serve at once.
This is the closing paragraph of a longer chafing-dish method — the carrot has already been simmered in something, and the lobster meat is already cooked. Read it as finishing instructions rather than a complete recipe, and supply the earlier steps from the full entry or a current lobster newburg-style method.
- What the carrot was doingThe carrot was evidently simmered in the liquid earlier in the method and then lifted out, so it was there for flavour rather than to be eaten. Root vegetables used this way and discarded are a common feature of period sauce-making; the recipe does not say how the carrot was cut or how long it cooked.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookThe lobster going in is already cooked meat. "When thoroughly heated" means hot through and no further — two to three minutes over a chafing-dish flame. Held longer it tightens, weeps water into the sauce and turns to rubber.
- Butter goes in off the heatThe recipe simply says to add the butter once the mixture is thoroughly heated; it gives no direction about the pan's position or the butter's temperature. If you want to keep the finish from separating, add it in pieces with the pan off the flame and swirl it in.
- The brandyAdded at the very end, it is meant to be tasted, not burned off, and there is no direction to flame it. If you do ignite it in a chafing dish, do it away from the table and with the spirit bottle closed and set aside.
- Wine quantityThe original gives no measure here, and none can be recovered from this paragraph. As a starting point for a pound of picked lobster meat, try about half a cup of dry sherry or Madeira in the base and a tablespoon of brandy at the finish, and adjust to taste.
- Seasonings of the periodThe recipe says only "seasonings" and names none. Salt and cayenne are the usual pairing with lobster in recipes of this sort; cayenne is the one that tells with lobster and wine.
- Chafing-dish heatHeat -- Nothing in this paragraph names the equipment; a chafing dish is an inference from the style of the method. If you are working over gas or induction rather than a spirit lamp, use the lowest setting and pull the pan off entirely while adding the butter.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities or yield. Scaled to a pound of lobster meat, it will serve about four on toast as a first course, or two as a supper dish.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American cities from the 1890s into the 1910s, and books like this one catered to it: the appeal was cooking at the table, in front of guests, after the theatre or at a late supper when the kitchen staff had gone. Lobster was the emblematic chafing-dish ingredient — sold already boiled, needing only reheating in a rich sauce, and expensive enough to signal the occasion. The pattern here, wine and cooked shellfish finished with butter and brandy, is the same family as lobster Newburg, which is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and which was echoed in variations in household cookbooks over the following decades. The discarded carrot is a survival of older French practice, where root vegetables flavoured a sauce and were then removed.