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Lobster à la Newburg
2 lb. lobster. ¼ cup butter ½ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Slight grating nutmeg 1 tablespoon Sherry 1 tablespoon brandy 1/3 cup thin cream Yolks 2 eggs Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in slices. Melt butter, add lobster, and cook three minutes. Add seasonings and wine, cook one minute, then add cream and yolks of eggs slightly beaten. Stir until thickened. Serve with toast or Puff Paste Points.
A chafing-dish sauce that lives or dies on temperature control. The printed ingredient list omits the lobster itself, which the method assumes you already have cooked and in the shell.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the cream and yolks go in, the mixture must only thicken — somewhere around 170-180F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into grains and liquid. Off the direct flame, over hot water, or on the lowest possible burner setting.
- How much lobsterThe quantity is missing from the list. Roughly 2 cups of picked meat — about what two small boiled lobsters yield — suits this amount of butter and cream, but that is an inference from the proportions, not something the recipe states.
- Chafing dish means gentle heatNewburg was a standard chafing-dish preparation, cooked at table over a spirit lamp — a low, diffuse flame — though this recipe itself specifies no equipment. A heavy saucepan over low heat, or a bowl set over barely simmering water, reproduces that. A thin pan on a modern gas ring will curdle the sauce before you notice.
- Thin creamPeriod "thin cream" was roughly 18-20 percent fat — light or single cream, rather richer than modern half-and-half and well short of heavy cream. Heavy cream will work and is more forgiving, but the sauce will be considerably richer than intended.
- Three minutes is for reheating onlyThe lobster is already cooked. Those three minutes in butter are to warm the meat and pick up flavour; longer and it turns fibrous and squeaky.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half is generous for two cups of meat, particularly if the lobster was boiled in salted or sea water. Add half, then taste at the end.
- Puff paste pointsSimply strips or triangles of baked puff pastry, cut before baking and used as a base or garnish. Store-bought all-butter puff, cut and baked at 400F until risen and dry, does the job.
- YieldServes three as a light main course, four as a first course, or six or so spooned onto small toasts.
Lobster Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and to a customer named Wenberg, whose name is said to have been scrambled to "Newburg" after a falling-out with the restaurant — a story repeated for well over a century but thin on documentation. What is certain is that by the time Fannie Farmer was compiling the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, the dish had escaped the restaurant and become the signature of the middle-class chafing dish, a fashionable piece of equipment in the 1890s and 1900s for late suppers and after-theatre entertaining. It is food cooked in front of guests, which is also why it is built from expensive ingredients that need only minutes of attention.