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Admiral Garnish
This is a fish garnish made up of boiled crayfish tails and prawns, mussels masked with villeroy sauce, covered with breadcrumbs and fried in fat and parsley, all placed in groups around the dish.
This is a compound garnish in the classical French manner — a set of separately cooked shellfish arranged in bouquets around a fish. Oscar assumes you already know how to make Villeroy sauce and how to hold a garnish hot, so the working details are all left out.
- The hinge: the sauce must be cold and setVilleroy sauce is a thick velouté or allemande (often flavoured with truffle or mushroom essence) that is used as a coating, not a pouring sauce. Dip the cooked mussels, spread them on an oiled tray and chill until the coating is firm before breading, or it will slide off in the fat.
- BreadingStandard anglaise: set sauce, then flour, beaten egg, fine dry crumbs. Because the mussels are already cooked and the coating already thick, the fry is only to colour the crust — 350–375F for about a minute.
- "Fried in fat"In a 1890s hotel kitchen this would usually have meant a deep kettle of clarified beef fat or lard. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works; the temperature matters more than the medium.
- Fried parsleyThe parsley is fried separately, not with the mussels. Use dry, whole sprigs, drop them in for a few seconds until the sputtering stops, and drain at once — it turns bitter and black very quickly.
- Crayfish and prawnsBoiled crayfish tails means freshwater crayfish, shelled after cooking in a court bouillon; the shells could be saved for shellfish butter. Any good peeled shrimp or langoustine tail stands in for the prawns.
- MusselsSteam open in a little white wine, discard any that stay shut, and pull the beard before saucing. Larger cultivated mussels hold up better to coating and frying than small wild ones.
- No quantities are givenA garnish is scaled to the fish. For a whole fish serving six, figure a dozen mussels, a dozen crayfish tails and a dozen prawns, set in alternating clusters around the platter.
- Assemble at the last minuteThe fried mussels lose their crispness within minutes of meeting a moist platter. Have the fish sauced and plated, then place the groups and the parsley and send it out.
Named garnishes like this one were the shorthand of grande cuisine: a kitchen brigade could read "garniture amiral" on an order and produce the same arrangement every time without further instruction, and Oscar Tschirky recorded them as bare descriptions rather than recipes. The naval name points at its content — everything in it comes out of the water — and it belongs to the same family of fish garnishes as Joinville, Normande and Dieppoise. Villeroy sauce, the element that makes the mussels possible, is by tradition associated with the Duc de Villeroy's household in the eighteenth century, though the attribution is not established, and it survives mainly in this role, as a sauce stiff enough to be chilled, crumbed and fried. The whole construction is characteristic of the Waldorf's period: a fish surrounded by small, labour-intensive set pieces that demonstrated how many hands the kitchen had.