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Oysters, Newburgh
Place thirty-six freshly opened large oysters with their liquor in a saucepan, add two gills water, a teaspoon salt, and boil for five minutes. Drain on a sieve, place in a sautoir with four tablespoons sherry, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne, then let cook on brisk fire for five minutes. Pour in one gill cream, half gill milk, and boil for five minutes again. Dilute two egg yolks with a tablespoon each brandy and cream and add to oysters. Gently mix while heating for three minutes but do not allow to boil, transfer oysters into a hot soup tureen and serve with six freshly prepared toasts separately.
A Delmonico's-style Newburg written when oysters were cheap and cooks were less anxious about overcooking them. The proportions are sound; the timings are not.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so two gills water is 1 cup, one gill cream is 1/2 cup, half a gill milk is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which makes two saltspoons of cayenne a genuinely fierce half teaspoon for six servings.
- SautoirA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any wide skillet or saucepan with enough surface area to hold the oysters in a single layer will do.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. The instruction "do not allow to boil" is the whole technique; above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains and liquid.
- Oyster timingsThree separate five-minute boils will reduce large oysters to erasers. Poach them in their liquor just until the edges ruffle, about 1 to 2 minutes, then lift them out and build the sauce separately, returning the oysters at the very end to warm through.
- Reducing the sherryThe five minutes over a brisk fire with sherry is there to cook off the raw alcohol and concentrate the wine. Do that in the empty pan, without the oysters sitting in it.
- SherryUse a dry amontillado or a fino, not "cooking sherry," which is salted. Given the salt already added at two stages, taste before adding the final half teaspoon.
- Tempering the yolksWhisk the yolks with the brandy and cream, then beat in a ladle of the hot sauce before returning the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to a hot pan is the usual cause of failure.
- Yield and serviceThirty-six oysters and six toasts means six servings. A soup tureen is optional; shallow warmed bowls with the toast alongside are closer to how it is eaten now.
Newburg is one of the small number of American restaurant dishes with a traceable origin: it is generally credited to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where a version of the sauce is said to have been introduced by a sea captain and shipping agent named Ben Wenberg and served as lobster "à la Wenberg" until a falling-out with the house prompted the name to be scrambled into "Newburg." The story is traditional rather than documented, but the Delmonico's connection is firm, and it explains why this recipe appears here at all: The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens and put the restaurant's repertoire into print for domestic cooks. The sauce -- cream, sherry, brandy, cayenne, thickened with nothing but egg yolk -- was quickly applied to whatever shellfish was to hand, and in a period when oysters were sold by the hundred and cost a fraction of lobster, oysters Newburg was the thrifty version of a luxury dish.