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Lobster à la Delmonico
2 lb. lobster Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup butter ¾ tablespoons flour ½ teaspoon salt Slight grating nutmeg 1 cup thin cream Yolks 2 eggs 2 tablespoons Sherry wine Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in small cubes. Melt butter, add flour, seasonings, and cream gradually. Add lobster, and when heated, add egg yolks and wine. 2 lb. lobster
A chafing-dish sauce built on a light roux, enriched at the last moment with yolks and Sherry. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the lobster is picked.
- The hinge: the yolksOnce the egg yolks go in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle into grains. Take the pan off the heat, stir a little of the hot sauce into the yolks, return the mixture, and let it thicken over the barest heat.
- The flour quantity is unclearThe amount of flour as printed cannot be read with confidence. For 1 cup of thin cream, 2 tablespoons gives a pourable sauce and 3 tablespoons a coating one; the yolks will thicken it further.
- Thin creamThis corresponds to what would now be sold as light or single cream, in the region of 18-20 percent fat. Light cream is the nearest match where it is available, half-and-half otherwise; heavy cream will make the sauce heavy and dull the lobster.
- The lobsterA 2 lb live lobster yields something under half a pound of picked meat, enough for two generous servings or four small ones over toast. Cooked tail-and-claw meat sold by weight can be substituted directly at about 6-8 oz.
- Do not cook the lobster twiceThe meat is already cooked when it comes out of the shell. Add it only to warm through, a minute or two; longer and it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- Chafing-dish heatA sauce of this kind was commonly made in a chafing dish over a spirit lamp, which is gentle and slow. On a modern burner, use low heat throughout and a heavy pan, or set a blazer over its hot-water bath for the egg stage.
- SherryA dry or medium-dry Sherry, added off the boil so the alcohol softens rather than cooks away entirely. So-called cooking sherry is salted and will throw the seasoning off.
- ServingServe immediately on toast points, in patty shells, or in the shell halves. The sauce will not hold or reheat once the yolks are in.
The chafing dish had a real vogue in American homes from the 1890s into the 1910s: a spirit lamp on the sideboard let a hostess cook at the table without servants, which suited late suppers and after-theatre parties. Lobster was among the chafing-dish ingredients above all others, cooked and picked in advance so that only the sauce needed making in company. The name points to Delmonico's, the New York restaurant that dominated American fine dining through the second half of the nineteenth century; by 1900 "a la Delmonico" appears to have drifted loose from the kitchen that inspired it and to have served largely as a signal of cream, wine and egg-yolk richness, much as "Newburg" did for the same set of ingredients.