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Paprika (Remove lobster meat from shell)
Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in strips. Cook butter with mushrooms broken in pieces and onion juice three minutes; add flour, and pour on gradually milk. Add lobster meat, season with salt and paprika, and, as soon as lobster is heated, add wine. Remove to serving dish, and garnish with puff paste or toast points and parsley. 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour
A paprika cream sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux, with lobster warmed through at the end. The ingredient list printed here is truncated — only the butter and flour quantities survive — so the proportions below are the ones the method implies.
- The missing quantitiesA quarter cup each of butter and flour is a medium roux; the milk quantity is missing from the printed list, but about 2 cups would give a sauce thick enough to coat. The mushrooms, onion juice, wine, salt and paprika are unquantified in the text; figure on 1/2 lb mushrooms, 1 teaspoon onion juice, 1/4 cup sherry or Madeira and 1 to 2 teaspoons paprika, tasting as you go.
- Lobster meatThe recipe starts from lobster already cooked, with the meat still in the shell. Two 1 1/4 lb lobsters yield roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of picked meat, about what this amount of sauce will carry. Cooked, chilled lobster from the fish counter works equally well.
- The one thing that mattersThe lobster is already cooked. It goes in only to be heated — a minute or two in the hot sauce, no more — or it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth. Have the serving dish and garnish ready before the lobster goes into the pan.
- Onion juiceA standard flavouring of the period: grate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, or halve an onion and press it against the grater. It gives allium flavour without pieces of onion in a pale sauce.
- PaprikaHere this would have meant sweet paprika of the Hungarian type, valued for the colour it gave the cream as much as for flavour. Do not use smoked Spanish paprika here; it will bully the lobster. Add it with the salt rather than into hot butter, where it scorches and turns bitter.
- Wine at the endAdding it last, off the heat or nearly so, keeps the aroma. If you prefer to cook off the alcohol, add it before the lobster and let the sauce return to a bare simmer, then fold the lobster in.
- Puff paste pointsBaked triangles or crescents of puff pastry, cooked separately and set around the dish. A sheet of thawed frozen puff pastry cut into triangles and baked at 400F until well risen and dry inside does the job; buttered toast points are the plainer option the recipe allows.
- YieldServes about four as a main course with the pastry, or six in small ramekins as a first course. The sauce thickens as it stands, so dish it up and garnish as soon as the lobster is hot.
Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives lobster a long section, and the creamed-and-sauced treatments here — Newburg among them, and this paprika version — belong to the restaurant French idiom that American hostesses were borrowing in the 1890s. Paprika arrived in that idiom through Hungarian cooking, which became fashionable in Western Europe and America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; dishes labelled "à la Hongroise" or simply "paprika" generally mean nothing more elaborate than sweet paprika stirred into a cream sauce. The dish is close kin to lobster Newburg, which the same book also prints, though Newburg is built on egg yolks and cream rather than a roux.