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Plain Lobster
Pour three tablespoonfuls of lemon juice over the meat of one lobster and season with salt and pepper. Put three tablespoonfuls of butter in the blazer, and, when it is melted, add the prepared lobster; stir until hot and serve at once.
Clams à la Newburgh.
Use one quart of clams. Separate the hard from the soft parts of the clams. Chop the hard parts fine. Substitute the soft and the chopped parts of the clams for the lobster and proceed as for lobster à la Newburgh.
Oyster, chicken, turkey or sweetbread à la Newburgh may be prepared by substituting one of the above ingredients for the lobster.
Lobster à la Bordelaise.
INGREDIENTS. 2 cloves of garlic, chopped.
I sliced carrot. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. 2 glasses of white wine (half a cup).
Meat of 2 lobsters.
I glass of brandy. 3 tablespoonfuls of butter.
Chopped parsley, white and cayenne pepper, salt.
Method. - Melt the butter in the blazer and in it cook the onion and carrot about five minutes.
A two-minute dish that lives or dies on the state of the lobster before it reaches the pan. Note also that this page runs several recipes together, so read past the first three sentences with care.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Any wide skillet over low to medium-low heat does the same work.
- Start with cooked lobster"The meat of one lobster" means meat already boiled or steamed and picked. The dish only warms it through; nothing here will cook raw shellfish.
- Heat it and stopThis is the hinge. Cooked lobster tightens and turns fibrous within a minute or two of real heat, so keep the butter barely bubbling and pull the pan as soon as the meat is hot to the touch.
- QuantitiesA 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly 5 to 6 oz of picked meat, which with 3 tablespoons of butter and 3 tablespoons of lemon juice serves two as a light course. The lemon is assertive; taste before adding all of it.
- Season before, not afterThe lemon, salt and pepper go onto the meat while it is cold, before it meets the melted butter.
- The run-on textEverything from "Clams a la Newburgh" onward belongs to separate recipes that the printed page ran together. The Newburgh variations depend on a lobster Newburgh recipe given earlier in the book and are unusable on their own.
- The Bordelaise fragmentThat ingredient list is incomplete: the method calls for cooking an onion that is never listed, and the text breaks off mid-method. Treat it as a fragment rather than a recipe.
- ServingToast points were a common accompaniment to chafing-dish shellfish, and they take up the lemon butter left in the pan.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the American chafing-dish vogue of the 1890s and early 1900s, when a spirit lamp and a blazer let hostesses cook at the table in rooms with no kitchen access, and when students, bachelors and boarding-house residents used the same equipment as their only stove. Lobster dominates the chafing-dish chapters of these books partly because it was widely canned, and because it was already cooked when bought, needing only to be reheated in butter or a cream sauce, which is precisely what a single small flame can manage. The word "plain" here is doing real work: it distinguishes this three-ingredient treatment from the Newburgh and Bordelaise versions crowded onto the same page, both of them built on the same picked meat.