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April 14
Menu: Lobster Newburgh; Glazed Sweetbreads; Loin of Lamb, Roasted, Mint Sauce; Asparagus Potato Croquettes; Pineapple Sherbet; Coffee Lobster Newburgh-2 pounds lobster, 1/4 cup Crisco, salt, red pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste, 1 tablespoon sherry, 1 tablespoon brandy, ½ cup cream, and 2 egg yolks. Remove cooked lobster meat from shell and cut in slices. Melt Crisco, add lobster and cook 3 minutes. Add salt, red pepper, grated nutmeg, sherry and brandy; cook 1 minute, then add cream and yolks of eggs slightly beaten, and stir until thickened. Serve with toast.
A classic Delmonico-style Newburg, rewritten to sell shortening. The technique is sound; only the fat and a few measurements need attention.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the cream and yolks go in, the sauce must be held below about 170F and stirred constantly. A bare simmer will scramble the yolks and break the sauce; pull the pan off the heat the moment it coats the spoon.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco was launched in 1911 as an all-vegetable substitute for butter and lard, and this book exists to promote it. Newburg is traditionally made with butter, and 4 tablespoons of butter in place of the quarter cup of shortening will give a better flavour with no change in method.
- "2 pounds lobster"Ambiguous in the original. Read as 2 pounds of cooked picked meat it would serve eight or more; read as two pounds of lobster in the shell it yields roughly 8 ounces of meat, enough for two. The sauce quantities would arguably carry somewhere around 12 to 16 ounces of picked meat.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A generous pinch is intended; Newburg should carry a distinct warmth behind the nutmeg.
- Three minutes is for already-cooked meatThe lobster is boiled or steamed beforehand. The three minutes in fat is to warm it through and take up the seasoning, nothing more. Longer and it turns fibrous.
- Sherry and brandyUse a dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry. Both spirits go in before the dairy so the alcohol has a minute to cook off over direct heat.
- ToastThe recipe says only "Serve with toast"; the dish was commonly served on points of plain white toast or in pastry shells. Toast made from a firm loaf holds up better than sliced sandwich bread under the sauce.
- YieldAs written, two generous main-course servings or four as a first course.
Lobster Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and to a sea captain named Ben Wenberg, who is said to have shown the kitchen the dish; after a falling-out with the restaurant the name is traditionally reported to have been scrambled from Wenberg to Newburg. Whatever the truth of that story, by the 1910s the dish had travelled from the chafing dishes of expensive restaurants into ordinary American cookbooks, which is exactly why it appears here. The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook from Procter & Gamble, and its "Calendar of Dinners" set out a year of menus using the new hydrogenated shortening, including in a rich cream-and-egg-yolk sauce.