National Crabmeat Newberg Day

What the day is

National Crabmeat Newberg Day is observed on September 25. It celebrates crab served Newburg style: picked meat warmed in a rich sauce of butter, cream, egg yolk and sherry, spooned over toast points or rice.

The name is usually spelled Newburg, and the dish is best known in its lobster form. Crab is the thriftier version and arguably the better one, since the sauce is delicate enough that lump crab is not lost in it.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The dish behind it is better attested, and the standard account places it at Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where a patron named Wenberg is said to have introduced the preparation. The story continues that the two parties fell out and the name was scrambled from Wenberg to Newburg, which is the kind of tidy anecdote that survives because it is memorable rather than because it is verified.

What is clear is the technique, which belongs to an older style of American restaurant cooking: a stovetop cream sauce enriched with egg yolk and finished with fortified wine, closer to a custard than a gravy. That fragility is why Newburg is a chafing-dish classic, served at the table from a pan kept barely warm.

How to take part

Made from scratch it takes about fifteen minutes, and the failure mode is always the same one.

• Keep the heat low. Egg yolk in cream will curdle the moment it simmers, and the sauce cannot be brought back once it splits.
• Temper the yolks with a little hot cream before they go into the pan, not the other way around.
• Add the crab at the very end and only warm it through. Crab that cooks in the sauce turns stringy and loses its sweetness.
• Use dry sherry rather than cooking sherry, which is salted and will make the sauce harsh.
• Serve it on something plain: toast, puff pastry, rice or plain egg noodles. The sauce is the whole dish.

Good canned or pasteurized crab is a reasonable substitute for fresh here, since the meat is being sauced rather than showcased.