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Chafing-Dish Recipes (Paprika Put the oysters)
paprika. Put the oysters in the blazer and cook till the bacon is crisp and the oysters plump. Pour the sauce mixture over the oysters, stirring it thoroughly into the gravy.
Serve from the chafing-dish.
LOBSTER À LA NEWBERG-Take two tablespoons of butter; two tablespoons of water; one teaspoon of flour; one mediumsized lobster, or one can of lobster; one pint of boiled milk; three eggs (yolks only); one-half cup of sherry. Place the butter in the blazer and stir it as it foams. Rub the flour smooth with the water, add this and the salt and pepper, then one-half of the milk, stirring all of the time and being careful that the flame is not too hot. Beat the yolks of the eggs until frothy, add the remainder of the milk and stir all into the chafing-dish. When the mass is of the consistency of cream, add the sherry, then the lobster cut up coarsely, and when thoroughly heated, serve. If using the fresh fish, split it down the middle, remove the coral and creamy green fat and set them to one side. Make the sauce as above, and, just before adding the lobster, rub the coral and the fat together until a paste is formed, then stir this in. When quite mixed, add the lobster.
Two chafing-dish dishes, the first cut off mid-sentence: the tail of an oysters-and-bacon recipe, then a full Lobster à la Newberg. Both were written for a spirit-lamp chafing dish, which is essentially a slow, weak burner — the equivalent today is a heavy saucepan over low heat, or a double boiler.
- The hinge: never let the yolks boilOnce the beaten yolks go in, the mixture must thicken to the consistency of thin cream and no further. A simmer will scramble it into curds that no amount of stirring will bring back. If the pan feels too hot, lift it off the flame entirely and keep stirring.
- Blazer and hot-water panThe "blazer" is the shallow metal pan that sits directly over the flame. Chafing dishes also came with a water pan beneath it; for a yolk-thickened sauce like this, use it, or work in a bowl over simmering water.
- Salt and pepper appear from nowhereThe ingredient list omits them but the method calls for them. Season lightly at that point — about half a teaspoon of salt — and correct at the end, since sherry and lobster both carry salt of their own.
- Canned lobsterThe original allows a can of lobster in place of fresh, though it adds separate instructions for the coral and creamy fat of a fresh one. Canned lobster was a widely available pantry item when this book was published. Today, cooked lobster meat from the fish counter stands in for "one medium-sized lobster."
- Coral and tomalleyThe coral is the roe, which turns red when cooked; the "creamy green fat" is the tomalley, or hepatopancreas. Both are traditional thickeners and give the sauce its color and depth. Note that health agencies now advise against eating tomalley in quantity, as it concentrates contaminants and marine biotoxins — the sauce works without it.
- SherryHalf a cup is generous for a pint of milk. Use a dry or medium sherry, not "cooking sherry," and add it while the pan is off the direct flame so it warms through rather than boiling off.
- YieldA pint of milk, three yolks and a lobster makes roughly four light supper servings, or more if spooned over toast, a common way of serving Newberg.
- The oyster fragmentFor the recipe above, cook only until the oysters plump and their edges ruffle, two to three minutes; they need less time than the bacon does, so crisp the bacon first.
Lobster Newberg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where it is said to have been introduced by a sea captain named Wenberg and renamed after a falling-out with the restaurant — a story often repeated, and worth treating as tradition rather than documented fact. Its arrival in a chafing-dish chapter is the more telling detail: by the 1890s the chafing dish had become a fixture of middle-class entertaining, the apparatus of the late supper after the theater or the college "spread," cooked at the table by the hostess herself rather than by a servant in the kitchen. Butterick, a pattern company selling to women who did their own work, gave the chafing dish its own section — and these were, after all, dishes a household could produce with one pan, one flame, and a can of lobster.