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Crayfish for Garnish
Take the desired number of crayfish and plunge them into boiling salted water in which a few chopped vegetables together with a little vinegar have been cooked. Place the pan on the fire and boil for eight or ten minutes longer. Toss them in the pan frequently until they are done.
This is a court-bouillon boil written for a garde-manger station that would use the cooked crayfish as decoration around a fish platter or in a chaud-froid. Two things matter: the acidulated vegetable broth, and not cooking them past the point where the tail meat firms.
- The "few chopped vegetables"The text does not specify them; a court-bouillon of this period would typically mean onion, carrot and celery, with seasoning to taste. "A little vinegar" is likewise unquantified: a splash is enough, and it firms the flesh as well as sharpening the flavor.
- Cook the vegetables firstThe instruction to plunge them into water "in which" the vegetables have been cooked means the aromatics should be simmered for a while before the crayfish go in. Dropping everything in together gives you much less flavor in the broth.
- TimingEight to ten minutes is long by current practice. Crayfish of ordinary size are usually done in roughly five minutes at a full boil, once the shells have turned red and the tails have curled tight; much beyond that the tail meat toughens.
- Buy them aliveCrayfish spoil very quickly once dead, and the recipe is written on the assumption they go into the pot alive. Sort out any that are limp or unresponsive before cooking and discard them.
- PurgingFarmed and wild crayfish both benefit from a rinse in several changes of cold water until it runs clear. The traditional step of removing the dark intestinal vein from the tail can be done before cooking with a twist of the middle tail fin, or after by peeling.
- Cooling for garnishFor garnish work they should be cooled quickly so the shells stay bright and the meat stays firm. Lift them out of the broth rather than letting them sit in it, and spread them on a tray.
- QuantityThe original gives none, since the number depends on the platter. As a rule, allow two to four whole crayfish per plate for decoration; if they are being eaten rather than used as garnish, allowances run far higher, since whole crayfish yield very little meat.
Crayfish were a fixture of the late nineteenth-century hotel kitchen less as a course than as scenery: boiled scarlet, hooked over the rim of a bowl of bisque or ranged around a cold salmon, they signaled a French-trained garde-manger at work. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, is full of these small preparatory notes addressed to staff who already knew what a court bouillon was and only needed to be told the house method. The vinegar in the water is a classic touch for freshwater crustaceans, generally credited with keeping the flesh white and firm. All of this came decades before the Louisiana crawfish boil became the dish most Americans associate with the animal.