Home › Recipes For The Chafing-Dish › Shrimps à la Newburg
Shrimps à la Newburg
1 pint shrimps 3 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon flour 1/2 cup cream Yolks 2 eggs 2 tablespoons Sherry wine Clean shrimps and cook three minutes in two tablespoons butter. Add salt, cayenne, and lemon juice, and cook one minute. Remove shrimps, and put remaining butter in chafing-dish, add flour and cream; when thickened , add yolks of eggs slightly beaten, shrimps, and wine.
A chafing-dish dish, which means the whole thing is built at the table over a spirit lamp — gentle, indirect heat is the point. The hinge is the egg yolks: once they go in, the sauce must thicken without ever approaching a simmer.
- Yolks, then no boilingAfter the yolks go in, the sauce sets between about 160F and 180F. Let it reach a bubble and it scrambles into curds that no whisking will fix. Pull the pan off the heat while it is still loose and let residual warmth finish it.
- A pint of shrimpsThis is a volume measure of picked shrimp meat, not weight — roughly 3/4 to 1 lb shelled, or about 1 1/2 lb in the shell. "Clean" means shell and devein; in 1896 it also meant picking them out of the tin or the shell yourself.
- Three minutes is for raw shrimpSmall raw shrimp are done in two to three minutes in butter, and the minute more with the seasonings brings them just to the edge. The recipe does not say whether the shrimps start raw — in this period they were often already boiled or canned — in which case warm them through only and add them at the end with the wine.
- The chafing-dishThe blazer pan sits either directly over the flame or over a hot-water pan beneath it. Use the water bath for the sauce stage. On a modern stove, the lowest burner setting or an improvised double boiler does the same job.
- One teaspoon flourNot a thickener in any real sense — it is insurance against the yolks breaking. The body of this sauce comes from egg and cream, so do not be tempted to increase it or you get a floury cream sauce with shrimp in it.
- CreamUse heavy cream, 36% or above; lower-fat cream is far likelier to break here. Period recipes distinguished thin from thick cream, and this one does not say which is meant.
- Sherry lastThe wine goes in at the very end, after the yolks. A dry to medium sherry; sweet cream sherry pushes the dish cloying.
- YieldServes three as a light supper on toast points, or four over rice or in patty shells. It does not hold or reheat — the sauce separates.
Newburg sauce — egg yolk, cream, butter and sherry, with a little cayenne — is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where the lobster version was said to have been named for a patron and then respelled when the two parted ways; the story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere with certainty. By the time Fannie Farmer compiled this book for the Boston Cooking-School in 1896, Newburg had escaped the restaurant and was among the dishes associated with the chafing-dish, a fashionable piece of equipment for late suppers, club rooms and hostesses without a cook at hand. Shrimp — often canned, and cheaper than lobster — served as a substitute, and the dish belongs to a period when cooking in front of guests was itself part of the entertainment.