The bachelor and the chafing dish

Lobster a la Newberg. — Extract the meat from two freshly boiled lobsters, weighing two pounds each, and cut it into small pieces. Put two ounces of butter in a pan over the fire, and as soon as it melts put in six fine-chopped button mushrooms, which must cook three minutes without browning. Then the lobster meat must be added ; also one even teaspoonful of truffles and one-half pint of sherry. Let this cook three minutes. Mix one and one-half cupfuls of cream with the yolks of four eggs and mix it well with the lobster, allowing it to remain a few minutes over the fire without boiling. Lobster Newberg can be made more simply by leaving out the mushrooms and truffles, and many people prefer it that way. . Frying Fish a la Savarin.— Brillat Savarin, in his Physiologie du GoAt , which was, according to Balzac, a veritable decalogue of gastronomers, irrefragable as the laws of Kepler, wrote : “ The beauty of a good fry is in carbonizing or browning the surface by sudden immersion — the process known as the ‘surprise.’ It forms a sort of vault to enclose all that is valuable, prevents the fat from reaching it, and concentrates the juices so as best to develop the alimentary qualities. Don’t forget when you have any of those trout weighing scarcely more than 1 68 The Bachelor arid the Chafing-dish. quarter of a pound, and fetched from streams that murmur far from the capital — don’t forget,*! say, to fry them in the very finest olive-oil you have. This simple dish, properly served up with slices of lemon, is worthy of a cardinal. In exactly the same way you should treat smelts, of which adepts think so much. The smelt is, among the fish, what the fig-pecker is amongst the birds : the same in size, the same in flavor, the same in excellence.” Turtle Steak A la Henry Guy Carleton. — After melting two ounces of butter in the chafingdish add a tablespoonful of mushroom ketchup, two tablespoonfuls of currant jelly, a gill of port wine, a dash of Cayenne, and a little salt. In this simmer the steak till tender ; finally add the juice of half a lime, and serve hot. Scallops. — Scald the scallops, then dry them in a napkin, and fry in the chafing-dish with a couple of walnuts of butter. To stew : Parboil for fifteen minutes, then put them in the dish with a pint of boiled milk, a walnut of butter, and season to taste. Simmer for eight or ten minutes. Thackeray’s Bouillabaisse. — Put a gill of olive-oil into the chafing-dish, a minced clove of The Autocrat and the Chafing-dish. log garlic, a tablespoonful of chopped onion, two cloves, six peppercorns, and, when browned, putin a pound of canned salmon with its liquid. Now add a little salt, piece of bay-leaf, two or three slices of lemon, a pint of tomato pulp, a pinch of curry powder or saffron, a gill of Rhine wine, with water enough to cover the fish. Simmer for twenty minutes. Line a deep dish with toast, remove from the pan all seasoning in sight, and then pour the contents of the pan over the toast. This dish was made famous by Thackeray.