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Lobster a La Newburg (Take the nicest part of two)
Take the nicest part of two small or one large lobster, put in chafing dish (cut in small pieces), with a tablespoonful of butter. Pour on it one gill of wine (or cream is better). Cook ten minutes, add the beaten yolks of three eggs and one-half pint of cream. Add one cup of mushrooms. Let all come to a boil and serve. This will serve six people.
A chafing-dish standard from the era when Newburg was breakfast food for people who could afford lobster before noon. One instruction needs ignoring outright.
- Do not let it boilOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, hold the sauce below a simmer, around 160-170F, stirring until it coats the spoon. "Let all come to a boil" will scramble three yolks into curds.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The wine is usually sherry or Madeira in dishes of this kind; if you use it, cook off the raw alcohol before the yolks go in.
- Chafing dishA wide, shallow pan over a low flame. A heavy skillet or a saucepan over low heat does the same work, and a bowl set over barely simmering water is more forgiving still once the eggs are added.
- Lobster quantity"The nicest part" is usually taken to mean claw and tail meat. One large or two small lobsters yields roughly 1/2 to 3/4 lb of picked meat. Use meat from lobster already cooked and cooled, and give it only two or three minutes in the butter -- ten minutes of cooking turns it stringy.
- Ten minutes with wineThat step is really about reducing the wine and warming the lobster through. Reduce the wine first on its own, then add the lobster for the last minute or two.
- MushroomsA cup of mushrooms in a recipe of this period may well have meant canned or bottled buttons, already cooked. Fresh mushrooms should be sliced and sauteed in butter separately until their liquid has gone, then folded in, or they will thin the sauce.
- Yield and servingSix portions is optimistic by modern appetites; it serves four as a lunch dish, six on toast points or in pastry shells. Season with salt, cayenne and a little nutmeg, none of which the original bothers to mention.
Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where the sauce of butter, cream, egg yolk and fortified wine was said to have been named for a patron, Ben Wenberg, and then renamed after a falling-out -- a story repeated in nearly every American cookbook since and documented in none of them firmly. What is certain is that by the 1890s the dish had escaped the restaurant and become the signature of the domestic chafing dish, a piece of equipment marketed hard to the American middle class for exactly this kind of cooking: rich, quick, made at the table without a servant.