No. 1037

Lobster a la Newberg or Delmonico

Homard a la Newberg ou a la Delmonico

Cook six lobsters each weighing about two pounds in boiling salted water for twenty-five minutes. Twelve pounds of live lobster when cooked yields from two to two and a half pounds of meat and three to four ounces of lobster coral. When cold detach the bodies from the tails and cut the latter into slices, put them into a sautoir, each piece lying flat and add hot clarified butter; season with salt and fry lightly on both sides without coloring; moisten to their height with good raw cream; reduce quickly to half and then add two or three spoonfuls of Madeira wine; boil the liquid once more only, then remove and thicken with a thickening of egg-yolks and raw cream (No. 175). Cook without boiling, incorporating a little cayenne and butter; warm it up again without boiling, tossing the lobster lightly, then arrange the pieces in a vegetables dish and pour the sauce over.

← No. 1036 Small Spiny Lobster Tails a la Monte Carlo (Lobster No. 1038 Lobster a la Paul Bert →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote this for a restaurant brigade, so the quantities are enormous and the method assumes a cook who already knows how a liaison behaves. The dish stands or falls on one point: the sauce must never boil once the yolks go in.

Scale it downSix two-pound lobsters yield only about two to two and a half pounds of picked meat. For four people, two 1 1/4-lb lobsters are ample; that is roughly a fifth of the original twelve pounds, so cut the rest of the recipe accordingly.
The hinge: no boiling after the liaisonOnce the egg-yolk-and-cream thickening goes in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — around 170-180F. A single boil curdles it into scrambled egg in cream. Ranhofer repeats the point, saying "cook without boiling" and then "warm it up again without boiling."
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, wider than a saucepan. A 10- or 12-inch skillet does the job; the point is that the slices lie flat in one layer rather than piling up.
"Raw cream" and No. 175Raw here means uncooked, not unpasteurized — plain heavy cream. No. 175 is Ranhofer's cross-reference to his standard egg-yolk-and-cream thickening; any conventional liaison, tempered with a little hot liquid before it goes into the pan, will serve.
"Moisten to their height"Add cream until it just comes level with the top of the lobster slices, no more. It is then reduced by half before the Madeira, which is what concentrates the flavor.
Cooking time for the lobstersTwenty-five minutes is long by current practice and will firm the meat considerably before it is even sauced. A two-pound lobster is generally given about fifteen minutes in boiling salted water; the meat then finishes in the butter and cream.
The coralThree to four ounces of coral comes out of twelve pounds of lobster, and Ranhofer notes the yield. Coral pounded with butter was used to color and enrich sauces. It is not called for in this preparation, but it is worth saving rather than discarding.
MadeiraUse a dry to medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho), not a supermarket "Madeira cooking wine," which is salted. Two or three spoonfuls for the full batch is a restrained hand; scaled down to a quarter of the lobster or less, that is well under a spoonful.
ServingA "vegetables dish" is a warmed shallow serving dish. The sauce can break if it sits, so plate and serve at once, with toast points or plain rice.

A Little History

This is Charles Ranhofer's own account of the dish, printed in The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The name is generally traced to a Delmonico's patron, a shipping merchant usually given as Ben Wenberg, who is said to have shown the kitchen a lobster-in-cream preparation that was put on the carte as "Lobster a la Wenberg" and rechristened by transposing the first letters after the two men quarrelled — a story repeated for well over a century but never documented in the restaurant's own papers. Ranhofer's giving both names in the title suggests the house was hedging. What the recipe itself shows is late-nineteenth-century American luxury cooking working in an entirely French idiom: a sautoir, a reduction, a Madeira lift and an egg-yolk liaison, applied to a shellfish that New England is often said to have considered cheap food fit for servants and prisoners, though the documentary basis for that tradition is thin.