Newburg Sauce
Make Poulette sauce. As soon as you have removed it from the fire, add a few tablespoons of white wine.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already have the previous entry in hand. Everything depends on the Poulette base and on what you do after the wine goes in.
- What Poulette sauce isA velouté — white roux loosened with veal, chicken or fish stock — finished off the heat with egg yolks beaten into cream, plus lemon juice and often chopped parsley. For a Newburg to serve with shellfish, build the velouté on fish or shellfish stock rather than chicken.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolksOnce the liaison of yolks and cream is stirred in, the sauce must not return to a simmer. Above roughly 180F the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks into grains. "Removed it from the fire" in the original is an instruction, not a stage direction.
- Which white wineA Newburg is classically finished with dry sherry or Madeira. The book's "white wine" is the broader, older reading; a dry sherry gives the flavour people now expect from the name.
- "A few tablespoons" — scale it yourselfReckon on 2 to 3 tablespoons of wine per cup of finished sauce. More than that thins the sauce and leaves a raw alcoholic edge, since there is no further cooking to drive it off.
- Warming the wineCold wine poured into a hot yolk-thickened sauce shocks it and encourages separation. Have the wine at room temperature and add it in a slow stream while stirring.
- Holding and reheatingAn egg-thickened sauce will not sit on the stove. Keep it in a bowl over warm — not simmering — water for up to half an hour, and reheat only gently, stirring, if at all.
- Yield and useA batch built on two cups of stock would serve roughly four to six over lobster, crab, shrimp or scallops, or on toast points. Salt at the end: the stock and the wine both concentrate the seasoning.
Newburg belongs to the American restaurant cooking of the late nineteenth century, and the standard account — traditional rather than documented in any contemporary record — traces it to Delmonico's in New York, where a lobster dish was said to have been named for a patron called Wenberg and rechristened after the two fell out. What the recipe shows in a book like this is how thoroughly French sauce structure had been absorbed into English-language household cookery: the compiler can be brief because she assumes the reader already knows velouté and its yolk-and-cream finish, and treats Newburg simply as Poulette plus wine.