Home › The World's Kitchen › Lobster, Newburg
Lobster, Newburg
Plunge two live lobsters in a gallon of boiling water with a tablespoon salt and boil twenty minutes. Remove, drain and let cool off, crack large claws and tails, carefully pick out meat without breaking and cut in half-inch pieces. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add lobster, season with a light teaspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper and gently brown for five minutes, carefully tossing meanwhile. Add two tablespoons sherry, a tablespoon brandy, and cook three minutes. Pour in one and a half gills cream, a half gill milk, lightly mix, and let boil six minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with two tablespoons milk and add to lobster, gently mix with wooden spoon while heating without boiling two minutes, remove, pour into a chafing dish or soup tureen and serve.
A straightforward chafing-dish Newburg, but the measures are pre-metric American and two of the timings will ruin the dish if followed literally.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilOnce the diluted yolks go in, the sauce has to stay below a simmer — around 175-180F — or it will scramble into grainy threads. Pull the pan off the heat before adding them, stir constantly, and return it to the lowest heat only if it needs help thickening.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup and half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is a lot of cayenne for this quantity — start with half that.
- Twenty minutes is too longA 1 to 1.5 lb lobster is done in 8-12 minutes at a hard boil; twenty minutes gives cottony, stringy tail meat. Since the picked meat is then browned and simmered again in the sauce, err short on the first boil.
- Boiling the cream six minutesSix minutes at a boil will reduce and possibly break the cream and toughen the lobster further. Bring it just to a simmer and hold it two or three minutes until it coats a spoon.
- "Gently brown" is not browningCooked lobster meat should be warmed through in the butter and lightly glazed, not coloured. Five minutes over moderate heat with frequent tossing is the outside limit.
- Sherry and brandyUse a dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry. The three minutes of cooking is there to burn off the raw spirit edge; the pan may catch alight if the heat is high, which is harmless but worth expecting.
- A gallon of water for two lobstersThat is barely enough to cover them and the temperature will crash when they go in. Use a stockpot with 6-8 quarts and a good tablespoon of salt per quart.
- Yield and servingTwo lobsters make four modest servings, or two generous ones. Newburg is served on toast points, in puff-pastry shells, or over plain rice; the chafing dish keeps it warm but should be set over hot water, not a direct flame, so the yolks do not tighten.
Lobster Newburg belongs to the late nineteenth-century American restaurant repertoire, and its origin is traditionally traced to Delmonico's in New York, where the dish is said to have been introduced by a sea captain patron named Wenberg and renamed after a falling-out with the house — an anecdote repeated in cookbooks for well over a century and documented mainly by its own retelling. Whatever the truth of the name, the formula is unmistakably of its moment: boiled shellfish enriched with butter, cream, egg yolks and fortified wine, brought to table in a chafing dish.