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Crawfish Bordelaise
1 1/2 lbs. crawfish meat 1/2 pint Cream Sauce 1 tablespoon butter 1 glass red wine 1 tablespoon minced carrot 1 tablespoon minced onion 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Few grains nutmeg Cook the carrot and onion in butter, add the wine, the meat and Cream Sauce with seasonings, boil up once and serve hot.
A short sauce dish that assumes you already have a pan of Cream Sauce standing by, as the rest of this book's fish chapter does. The measurements are loose in two places worth pinning down.
- The hinge: barely heat the crawfishCrawfish tail meat is already cooked when you buy or pick it, and it turns cottony within a minute or two of boiling. "Boil up once" means bring the sauce to a bubble and take it off; add the meat at the very end and warm it through, no more.
- "1 glass red wine"Period measure tables usually reckon a wine glass at about 2 fluid ounces, i.e. 1/4 cup, though the figure is not fixed from book to book. Reduce it with the carrot and onion before the cream sauce goes in, or the finished dish will be thin and sharp.
- "1/2 pint Cream Sauce"One cup of white sauce; the standard proportion of the period is roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Make it before you start, since nothing here allows time for it.
- Crawfish meat1 1/2 lbs of picked tail meat is a great deal of crawfish; at the usual yield of roughly 15 per cent of live weight that is on the order of 10 lbs live. Frozen cooked Louisiana tail meat, thawed and drained, is the practical substitute; small cooked shrimp behave the same way in the sauce.
- Cut the vegetables fineA tablespoon each of carrot and onion is a token mirepoix, and it gets only a couple of minutes in butter. Mince it very small so it softens in that time rather than sitting in the sauce raw and crunchy.
- Nutmeg and cayenne"Few grains" is a pinch, and it should stay one. The nutmeg is there to season the milk sauce, not to be tasted as nutmeg.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as a main course or six as a first course. The consistency suits toast points, rice, or pastry shells; the original assumes the reader knows this and says nothing.
Bordelaise in American cookbooks of this period had drifted a long way from the Bordeaux kitchen: here it means little more than red wine with a scrap of carrot and onion, where a French cook would have recognized écrevisses à la bordelaise as crawfish flamed in cognac and simmered with mirepoix and white wine. Crawfish were not necessarily exotic to the book's audience: they were taken from lakes and streams in the upper Midwest as well as from Louisiana.