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Chivry Garnish
This consists of oysters, potatoes, crayfish, mussels, villeroy sauce and breadcrumbs prepared as follows: Take some oyster bouchees and potato croquettes; boil some crayfish and remove the tails, leaving the shells on; mask some mussels with villeroy sauce, cover with breadcrumbs and fry them in boiling fat. Arrange in small heaps round the dish.
This is a classical garniture rather than a dish in itself: four small components made separately and set in heaps around a finished platter of fish. Oscar assumes a cook who already knows bouchée pastry, croquette mixture and sauce Villeroy, so the entry reads as a checklist.
- The hinge: chill before crumbingSauce Villeroy is a thick velouté-based coating sauce, and masked mussels must be spread on a tray and refrigerated until the coating is firm and set, ideally an hour or more. Crumbed while soft, they burst in the fat and the sauce runs out.
- Villeroy sauceNot a modern pantry item. It is a reduced velouté (fish velouté here) enriched with egg yolk and cream and cooked down until a spoon drawn through leaves a clean track; it should coat like thin custard and set solid when cold.
- BouchéesSmall round puff-pastry cases, roughly 1½ to 2 inches across, baked blind and hollowed. Frozen vol-au-vent cases work. The oysters are lightly poached in their own liquor for a minute or two and bound with a little sauce before filling; longer poaching makes them rubbery.
- "Boiling fat"Deep fat at 350–375F. The mussels are already cooked, so this is a fry for colour only — one to two minutes, until the crumb is gold.
- CrayfishThe instruction means detach the tail and leave its shell on, so the garnish shows red. Live crayfish go into boiling salted or court-bouillon water for about three minutes. Whole cooked crayfish or good langoustine tails substitute.
- MusselsSteam in a covered pan with a splash of wine until they open, three to five minutes, and discard any that stay shut. Debeard before cooking, not after.
- Potato croquettesDry duchesse mixture — riced baked potato, yolk, butter, seasoning — shaped small, breaded and fried with the mussels. Cork shapes about an inch long keep the garnish in scale.
- QuantityOscar gives none. For a platter serving six, figure one bouchée, one croquette, one crayfish tail and two mussels per person, set in four separate heaps rather than mixed.
The named garnitures of classical French cooking were a professional shorthand: a chef wrote "Chivry" on a menu and any trained kitchen knew what went on the plate. The Chivry name attaches most durably to beurre de Chivry, a green herb butter of tarragon, chervil, chives and shallot, and to the velouté based sauce made with it, generally served with poached fish and poultry; the garnish recorded here belongs to the same family of fish accompaniments. Oscar Tschirky was not a cook but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 book is generally taken to draw on the working repertoire of the hotel's French-trained brigade, which is why entries like this one are addressed to someone who already knows how to make a velouté and needs only the list.