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Lobster in Shells
Cut an equal quantity of lobster meat and mushrooms into dice. Boil some veloute sauce, together with some essence of mushrooms till properly reduced. Then thicken it with fresh butter and lobster butter in equal proportions, and mix in the lobster and mushrooms. Fill some table shells with the preparation, sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top, pour over a little warmed butter, and bake in a hot oven until browned. Place the shells on a hot dish and serve. Lobster, Newburg Pick all the meat from the shells of two good sized freshly boiled lobsters, and cut it into one-inch pieces, which place in a saucepan over a hot range together with one ounce of fresh butter, season with a pinch of salt and half a saltspoonful of red pepper, two medium-sized truffles, cut into dice-shaped pieces, after cooking for five minutes add a wineglassful of Madeira wine; reduce one-half, say about three to four minutes, then have in readiness three egg yolks in a bowl with half a pint of sweet cream, and beat well together, adding this to the lobster, gently stir for two minutes longer until it becomes thick, pour into a hot tureen and serve.
Lobster on Skewers Take a freshly boiled lobster, cut it into squares, lay them in a bowl to season, with salt, a pinch of pepper, half a pinch of nutmeg, and a tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce; mix these ingredients well together. Have six skewers and arrange on them first a piece of lobster, then a mushroom, another piece of lobster, then another piece of mushroom, and so on. Lay them on the broiler and broil for eight minutes. Take them off, dress on a hot dish on six slices of broiled bacon, pour over a gill of maitre d'hotel butter, and serve while they are very hot.
Three lobster preparations run together on one page, sharing a set of Waldorf pantry assumptions that no longer hold. The hinge in all three is heat control: lobster meat is already cooked, so every further minute over the flame is a minute toward rubber.
- Velouté and essence of mushroomsVelouté is a light stock-based white sauce — butter and flour roux moistened with veal or chicken stock, not milk. Essence of mushrooms was the reduced strained liquor from cooking mushrooms; a strong reduction of mushroom trimmings simmered in stock does the same job, or a splash of the liquid from sautéing the mushrooms you are dicing.
- Lobster butterButter pounded with the shells, coral and tomalley of a boiled lobster, warmed, strained and chilled. A professional kitchen kept it on hand; there is no shop substitute, and without it the shells taste merely of mushroom cream. Make it from the shells of the same lobster.
- Table shellsCleaned lobster half-shells, or the scallop-shaped porcelain "coquille" dishes standard in hotel service. Individual gratin dishes of about 3/4 cup work identically.
- A hot oven425–450F. The filling is already cooked and hot; the oven is only browning crumbs and butter, which takes 8–10 minutes. A broiler set some distance from the element does it faster and is closer to what a hotel range offered.
- Wineglass, gill, saltspoonA wineglassful is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup), a gill is 1/2 cup, and a saltspoonful is roughly 1/4 teaspoon — so half a saltspoon of red pepper is a scant 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne. "Sweet cream" simply means unsoured; use heavy cream.
- The Newburg will curdle if it boilsOnce the yolk-and-cream liaison goes in, the pan must be off direct high heat and the sauce coaxed to nap-thickness — it will not reach a full simmer without scrambling. Two minutes of gentle stirring, as written, is accurate, and it is the whole technique.
- TrufflesThe two medium truffles called for are now a luxury far beyond the lobster. Preserved truffle peelings, or their omission, leaves a dish that is still recognisably Newburg; truffle oil is not a substitute and will dominate the cream.
- Skewers and broilingEight minutes under a modern broiler is too long for meat that is already cooked; three to four minutes, turning once, browns the surface without drying it. Soak wooden skewers or use metal, and note that the bacon slices beneath must be broiled separately beforehand.
- YieldThe Newburg is written from two boiled lobsters and the skewers from one; the shell gratin gives no quantity, only equal parts lobster and mushroom. Reckon on roughly four first-course portions from a two-lobster batch, and the skewer version is written for six skewers.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is the record of a hotel kitchen at the moment American lobster shifted from cheap coastal protein to a dining-room luxury, and all three of these treatments assume a cook who can afford to throw away the shells' worth of flavor into butter. The Newburg is the famous one: the Waldorf inherited the dish from Delmonico's, where it is generally traced to a ship captain named Wenberg who is said to have shown the preparation to Charles Ranhofer in the 1870s, the name being reversed after a falling-out — a story repeated in nearly every American cookbook since and documented nowhere contemporaneous. What is documented is Ranhofer's own printed version, and Oscar's here follows the same logic: cooked lobster warmed in butter and Madeira, then bound with yolks and cream off the heat. The other two dishes show the same meat pushed through the standard French repertoire of the period — a gratin in the shell and a broiled brochette on bacon — which is how a hotel menu of the 1890s got a dozen listings out of a single ingredient.