by James Steen
Of course, there have been numerous variations since these dishes were created. A spoonful of caviar, for instance, is added if the cook is feeling extravagant. Tabasco is sometimes added to Newburg. But essentially they are at their best when they are not too fussy, and neither calls for fancy accompaniments. A vibrant green salad is the perfect partner.
From their creation, both dishes were instant hits, particularly illustrative of the rich tastes from the early 1900s to 1920s, and for decades they were highly popular in restaurants in France, America and Britain. They epitomise the Escoffier style, even though he did not have a hand in their inventions. American lobster (Homarus americanus) and European lobster (Homarus gammarus) are the only ‘true’ lobster species. They have smooth shells and large front claws. Their shells, which can be blue, brown or even green, turn red when cooked. While spiny (or rock lobster) has sweet, firm meat, the American and European species have a richer, more savoury flavour.
Over the past couple of decades, Thermidor and Newberg have slowly vanished from many menus. People have lost an appetite for lobster in restaurants, possibly because it is considered too expensive for both restaurant and diner. But combine the expense with the fact that – let’s face it – lobster is brutally destroyed when in the wrong hands. It can be easily overcooked and therefore ruined. Once ruined, there is no sauce, be it an exquisite Thermidor or a superb Newburg, which can bring lobster back to life on the palate.
So ordering lobster from a menu became something of a gamble. You and I, let’s say, are visiting a restaurant for the first time. It seems a nice place, but we have no idea of the quality of the food. The restaurant could be great, or it could be dreadful. On the menu, there is Lobster Thermidor or Lobster Newberg, as well as a choice of steaks. We have the menu in our hands and mentally, of course, we weigh up the odds; lobster or steak? We like both. But which one is the chef likely to get right? Or, if you are a pessimist, which one is the chef most likely to mess up? Either way, we shall most likely opt for steak. The history of lobster, unfortunately, proves it.
That is one of the reasons why steak is on so many menus in Europe and the States, and why there are so many steak restaurants. When did you last see a lobster restaurant? And if you are a restaurateur with Lobster Newburg on the menu, but no one is buying it … Well then, you will remove it from the menu to save yourself from going bust.
It is quite simple to train a chef to cook the perfect steak, and steak does not use up much space in a professional kitchen. Lobster takes up space and it must be kept alive before it is cooked. Think of those times when you have eaten lobster and it is spongy. Chances are, the lobster was cooked when it was stone cold dead. It should be live, or have been recently alive, when it is immersed into the big pot of bubbling, boiling water.
*
Newberg is the eldest of the two dishes. The story begins with Ben Wenberg, who was a merchant seaman, trading in fruit which he bought in Cuba and sold in New York. Or he was a broker in downtown Manhattan. Whatever his profession, he liked to eat at Delmonico’s restaurant and became friends with the owner Charles Delmonico, the latest in a line of Delmonicos to run the restaurant since it opened in the 1820s. Anyhow, one day in 1876 Wenberg was having lunch and mentioned to Delmonico that, on his travels, he had eaten lobster which was cooked in an unusual way. Wenberg was kind enough to cook the dish, in order to show the restaurant owner how it was made.
In Delmonico’s: A Century of Splendor, Lately Thomas writes:
A man who witnessed Ben’s initial preparation of the dish recounted the scene thirty years afterwards, and recalled particularly that at the end Wenberg took from his pocket a small flask, and shook into the pan a little of the reddish powder it contained – the inevitable ‘secret ingredient’. Delmonico’s cooks were satisfied that the stuff was only cayenne pepper, though Ben never told. This same witness of Wenberg’s first demonstration maintained that the dish, when ‘made to perfection,’ should contain only ‘lobster, sweet cream, unsalted butter, French cognac, dry Spanish sherry, and cayenne pepper.’
The restaurant employed French chefs, one of whom was given the task of replicating the cooking style and perhaps adding a few touches. That explains the classical French style of this dish, and the incorporation of plenty of butter and the reduction of Madeira. It is all very French. The dish went onto the menu with the fruit trader’s name attributed to it. People came just to try this wonderful new dish ‘Lobster à la Wenberg’. Some months later, Delmonico and Wenberg fell out. They had a row, the subject of which is still a mystery. The dish was selling extremely well, and perhaps Wenberg asked for a cut of the significant profits from the dish. Who knows? But the fall-out was bitter enough for Delmonico to rewrite all the menus, changing the name of the dish from Lobster à la Wenberg to Lobster à la Newberg. The recipe was in cookery books in the 1880s, and in her bestseller, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), Fannie Merritt Farmer’s recipe includes sherry and brandy, with no Madeira, and it is served on ‘puff paste pointes’. She also offers recipes for shrimps and clams, both ‘à la Newburg’ (Newberg’s spelling is uncertain). Confusingly, she also has a recipe for Lobster à la Delmonico, which has plenty of sherry but no brandy.
Thermidor was a play before it was a dish. Written by Victorien Sardou, it is a drama of four acts, set during the French Revolution and in particular the Thermidorian Reaction. This refers to the 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the date, according to the French Republican Calendar, when radical revolutionaries such as Robespierre began to lose their power. It was the end of The Reign of Terror and the mass executions in France.
In 1891, Thermidor was staged for the first time at La Comédie-Française, a state-owned theatre. The dish came about at the same time. It seems probable that Sardou and his troupe of actors planned to have a celebratory dinner to mark the opening night, and so a chef named a dish to honour the event. What is debateable is the Paris restaurant where the dish was created. Was it Chez Marie? Or maybe it was at Café de Paris, and by chef Leopold Mourier; the recipe was adapted subsequently by his successor Tony Girod, who added cheese. (Larousse Gastronomique accepts the dish was created to honour the play, but cites its occurrence as 1894, and at Chez Marie.)
However, if Sardou and his friends were hoping for a pleasant evening of glass-chinking and back-slapping they were in for a disappointment. They had not reckoned on the admirers of Robespierre who were incensed by the play’s criticism of their hero. Violent crowds arrived at the theatre in protest. Sardou’s life was threatened. The police rushed in, trying to calm the crowds and deal with the disorder; there was a performance that evening, and a few more after that. But the play caused such a headache for law enforcers that within a week the show came off, and it was prevented from being performed in any of the state-run venues. Five years passed before it was performed on another of the city’s stages, by which time Thermidor the dish was destined to run and run.
*
When alive, the lobster is blue. Once cooked, it is red. It is a crustacean which has blood that is blue due to the blood’s high level of copper. Frozen lobster is fine; the freezing of this shellfish does not affect its quality. When buying fresh lobster, choose one with hutzpah.
Some suggest you should avoid buying a female lobster that has eggs beneath its tail, although here the usual contradictions of gastronomy arise: French connoisseurs call the egg-laden female lobster ‘paquette’ and consider it to be at its most delicate when the eggs are fully formed but not laid.
The execution of a lobster is also not simple. They have a complex series of brain and nerve centres, so cutting through their head doesn’t necessarily kill them. Instead, put the point of a large knife through the cross on the back of the lobster’s head and quickly split the head in two. Turn the lobster around and speedily split the tail in half to ensure the nerve centres are severed.
Homard à la broche is a dish which requires plunging a large (1.5 kilogram) lobster into boi
ling salted water for three minutes, before seasoning it and attaching it to a spit. Then it is roasted in front of a very hot fire for about 45 minutes, basting frequently with melted butter.
This brings to mind A Book of Mediterranean Food, in which Elizabeth David told her readers in the 1950s of roast lobsters, referring to a recipe in Spons Household Manual (published in the 1880s). The recipe, the great Ms David, acknowledged, ‘is given merely as an illustration of the methods, both lavish and somewhat barbaric, of those days’. The recipe skips the bit about plunging the lobster.
It is:
Tie a large uncooked lobster to a long skewer, using plenty of pack-thread and attaching it firmly, for a reason presently to be stated. Tie the skewer to a spit and put the lobster down to a sharp fire. Baste with champagne, butter, pepper and salt. After a while, the shell of the animal will become tender and will crumble between the fingers. When it comes away from the body the operation of roasting is complete. Take down the lobster, skim the fat from the gravy in the dripping pan, add the juice of a Seville orange, pepper, salt, and spice and serve in a lordly dish.
In the 18th century cooks often put a skewer in the vent of the lobster’s tail. No, this was not a humane form of execution. Instead, it prevented water from entering the body during the boiling process. And there was a clever technique to brighten the shell before serving: put a slab of butter in a cloth and rub the lobster with the cloth.
I do like the lobster tale in Jacques Pepin’s autobiography, The Apprentice. The chef was making a television programme, and the plan was to film him as he hauled up cages of lobster off the shores of Long Island. He intended to cook 60 lobsters and in order to make it all happen, a couple of bushels of live lobster were bought from a fishmonger and placed in the cages. This would ensure realism. But as the cages were raised to the water’s surface, Jacques writes, ‘I squinted and realized that we’d forgotten to take the rubber bands off their claws’.
‘The cameras,’ says Jacques, ‘rolled on.’
STARGAZY PIE
The world’s strangest-looking pie, some of its contents emerging through the baked pastry to stare at the stars.
It is Christmastime one year in the late 1700s. Britain is struggling against starvation and in the grips of another terrible winter.
Come now to Mousehole, a harbour village close to Penzance in Cornwall. (Very much a tourist spot, these days.) The houses are being lashed and battered by the never-ceasing rain and the fierce winds of strong storms. Tom Bawcock, brave and courageous, is determined to find food for his family and the community. He gathers together a crew of equally heroic fishermen, and they make their way to the boats which are bouncing up and down on the rolling waves. Off they go. Or the others stay at home and Tom goes alone, depending on the Cornish teller of the story.
Many thought Bawcock (and his crew, if they went) would never return. That they did is not only testament to the Cornish spirit and fortitude, but wondrous because it also brought about the creation of one of the finest pies known to mankind. When they sailed back into the harbour, their boats were laden with fish. Seven types, it is said; pilchards, mackerel, ling, hake, dog fish, scad and the slender-buttasty lances (they are sand eels but sometimes called lances because of their pointy noses).
Stargazy (or stargazey, or even starrygazy) pie is the dish created to celebrate their achievement. The star gazer is the navigator on a ship, plotting a course by the stars above.
Custom dictates that the dish is eaten in Mousehole on 23 December every year, when a festival is held to commemorate Tom Bawcock, his fishermen friends and their plight.
Through the lid of the crusty pastry lid, or around the pastry’s edges, the heads of some of the fish protrude as if they are gazing up to the stars; another reason for the pie’s name. Marguerite Patten was not wrong when she described stargazy as ‘a most unusual looking fish pie’.
Up until the late 1600s, pastry, or paste as it was called, was not actually eaten, and was more like a ‘shell’ in which to keep food well stored and preserved, a sort of Tupperware box for medieval times. But by the arrival of stargazy pie, pastry was an art form, perfected by Tudor cooks, and actually eaten, along with the ingredients inside it.
Eliza Smith’s book, The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion (published in 1727), has many recipes for ‘pye’ (spelling was evolving and this was a time when soup was soop).
In Smith’s book there are the usual pie suspects – lamb, chicken and veal. She also suggests a pie of neats’ tongues, which are first boiled, blanched and sliced. Her battalia pye is certainly not a dish for vegetarians. ‘Take four small chickens, four squab pigeons, four sucking rabbets,’ it begins. ‘Cut them in pieces, season them with savoury spice and lay them in the pye, with four sweetbreads sliced, with as many sheep’s tongues, two shiver’d palates, two pair of lamb stones, twenty or thirty coxcombs, with savoury balls and oysters. Lay on butter, and close the pye. A Lear.’ The ‘pye’ was closed with pastry, and the ‘lear’ was a sauce or gravy.
*
Traditionally, the Cornish made stargazy with pilchards, the heads left on, of course, so that the fish could stargaze. Patten notes that pilchards have become scarce around the Cornish coast, and so for her version she suggests small herrings if pilchards are not available. First, she makes a mix of breadcrumbs, finely chopped parsley, milk, lemon zest and juice, and chopped onions. Half of this mix is used to stuff the fish; the other half fills the spaces between the fish. Next, chopped bacon and more chopped onions are added, sliced hard-boiled eggs too, along with a generous splash – and then another – of dry cider. She covers the dish with shortcrust pastry and bakes for 45 minutes in a hot oven.
Bread or breadcrumbs are usual in this pie. Some cooks add a little cream to the cider. Cornish chef Nathan Outlaw uses mackerel – minus the heads, but with the tails intact so they can emerge through the pastry – and a bit of hog’s pudding, a sort of white pudding particular to Cornwall and Devon. While Mark Hix makes his luxurious version with the legs of rabbit and crayfish: ‘They are both classed as vermin and in need of culling. I wanted to think of a way we could eat them.’ In Hix’s pie the crayfish, and not the rabbit limbs, gaze heaven-wards.
So revered is the memory of Tom Bawcock and his dish that he and it receive numerous mentions in Cornish literature. Around 1930, Robert Morton Nance wrote a poem about the pie. He set it to the tune of ‘The Wedding March’, a Cornish folk song. Here are a couple of verses:
A merry place, you may believe,
Was Mousehole ’pon Tom Bawcock’s eve;
To be there then, who wouldn’t wish,
To sup on seven sorts of fish.
As each we’d clunk as health were drunk
In bumpers brimming high.
And when up came Tom Bawcock’s name,
We praised him to the sky.
Morton’s odes to food include, by the way, his ‘Merry Ballad to the Cornish Pastie’, written in the late 1800s:
For it gives sweet ease to the scullery quean
Who hath nor platters nor knives to clean
So I wish him joy whoever he be
That first found out the Cornish Pastie.
IKA-SŌMEN
A Japanese dish of noodle-like strips of raw squid, with grated ginger and a splash of soy sauce.
Mother Nature went some way to protecting squid from predators. She made them almost translucent. They do not dwell on the sea bed, but swim close to the surface of the water. Their translucency, therefore, means they are virtually invisible to the hungry fish and sea creatures beneath them. However, there is still no protection from predators above, particularly those in fishing boats.
This cephalopod can be found in all oceans and seas, says Alan Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food, except the Black Sea.
Many shy away from cooking strips of squid, fearing it will be rubbery. The trick is to cook it quickly on a high heat. It can be scored with a sharp
knife, and then placed on a hot grill. If the squid releases too many juices during cooking, then the heat is too low. Have another go. Play a song which is two minutes long. If you are still cooking the strips of squid when the song has finished, then you have cooked for too long: the squid will be rubbery.
The Japanese dish of ika-sōmen is even easier because you do not need a griddle, pan, heat or a song. The dish is raw, but a sharp knife is crucial.
Ika means cuttlefish, the Japanese name for squid. Sōmen describes wheat noodles, the width of which the strips should resemble.
It was, some say, created by squid fishermen in Northern Japan. This dish is famous and cherished in Hokkaido, the country’s northernmost and second largest island, a staggeringly beautiful, tranquil place with volcanoes, national parks, lakes, hot springs and snow in the winter months.
There are disputes over whether or not this dish is sashimi. As sashimi means ‘flesh pierced’ then it is probably acceptable to say that it is indeed sashimi. The fillet of squid should be fresh, and is sliced to the thickness of vermicelli, or sōmen, which is about two millimetres.
The coloured outside ‘skin’ is removed, and the conical body of the squid is sliced once lengthways along the middle. Excess moisture is wiped away (with kitchen paper). The fillet is then sliced, lengthways, from top to bottom in thin strips. The ginger can be grated, or sliced into thin strips (slicing the peeled ginger root, also lengthways). Finally, the ginger can be placed in the bottom of the bowl, with the squid noodles on top, and a little more ginger on top.