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Crayfish Boiled in Court Bouillon
Put some butter in a stewpan, and add a little celery root, onion and leek, all finely minced, place the pan on a moderate fire and fry them. Then add a little white wine, salt, a small bunch of parsley, and a few peppercorns. Boil for seven or eight minutes, and then throw in twenty-five live crayfish; cover over the pan and boil for eight minutes longer. Toss them in the pan a little, remove, place on a strainer to drain, and then on a dish. Strain the liquid, reduce it by boiling to half its original quantity, add a small piece of butter, and pour it over.
Crayfish, Bordelaise Style Place two dozen selected crayfish in a pan with water and a little milk mixed, and allow them to soak for two or three hours; then remove them and place on a strainer to drain. In the meantime make a good mirepoix of vegetables with Bordeaux wine, and add to the liquor a bunch of parsley, a slice of raw ham, one small wineglassful of cognac, two or three tablespoonfuls of Madeira and a little salt. Put the lid on the stewpan, place it on the fire, and let boil five or seven minutes; when it is boiling hot throw in the crayfish, and leave for ten minutes, after which pour the liquor through a sieve; reduce it to half, adding slowly one pint of veloute sauce. When sufficiently reduced strain it through a cloth into another pan, and stir in one-fourth pound of good butter, a small piece of crayfish butter, and one tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley. Remove the small claws, put them in a group in the center of the dish, and arrange the bodies round, garnishing all with a few sprigs of parsley. The sauce must be served separately.
Two related preparations, both built on the same idea: a short aromatic bath that flavors the crayfish and then becomes the sauce. The reductions are where the work is.
- Court bouillon here is a pan, not a potOscar's first version uses only "a little white wine" over a sweated vegetable base — a scant, concentrated liquid, not the deep kettle of salted water an American crawfish boil uses. Expect very little liquid in the pan; the crayfish steam as much as they boil under the lid.
- Live crayfish and the eight minutesEight minutes for crayfish added to already-boiling liquid is at the long end. They are done when the shells turn scarlet and the tails curl tight, generally three to five minutes for market-size animals; hold to the shorter time or the tail meat turns cottony.
- The milk soakThe Bordelaise version soaks the crayfish in water and milk for two to three hours. The recipe does not say why; the likely aim is to purge grit and freshen the flavor of pond-caught stock. With farmed or clean-water crayfish a 30-minute rinse in cold water should do the same job.
- Devein before cookingPulling the dark intestinal thread from the tail of a live crayfish by twisting the middle tail fin is a classic French technique; this recipe does not mention it. It matters more with wild crayfish than farmed.
- Mirepoix and BordeauxThe "good mirepoix" means diced carrot, onion, celery and often a scrap of pork or ham sweated in butter. Use a dry, tannic red — a plain Bordeaux or any Cabernet-based wine; the sauce will go muddy pink, which is correct.
- Veloute and crayfish butterVeloute is a white roux thinned with veal or chicken stock, not milk. Crayfish butter is made by pounding the roasted shells with softened butter and straining it warm; without it the sauce has no depth, so plan to make it from the shells of an earlier batch or buy a shellfish butter.
- A moderate fireFor the initial sweating of the vegetables, medium heat — the recipe says to fry them, so keep the aromatics soft rather than deeply browned before the wine goes in.
- YieldTwenty-five crayfish is a first course for two, or a small plate for four. Two dozen in the Bordelaise version, with a pint of sauce, likewise serves two to four as an appetizer.
Crayfish were a fixture of French restaurant cooking in New York in the 1890s, and Oscar Tschirky's book reflects a Waldorf kitchen run on Escoffier-era lines, where the same shellfish appeared in a plain nage one night and a wine-and-cognac sauce the next. "Bordelaise" in this context signals the red Bordeaux and mirepoix rather than the marrow-and-shallot steak sauce of the same name. The pairing of the two recipes on one page is instructive: one is a five-ingredient bath, the other layers ham, cognac, Madeira, veloute and compound butter over it.