Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Crayfish Mariniere
Crayfish Mariniere
Remove the small claws from a dozen or two of crayfish, place them in a stewpan, and boil with wine until done. Drain off the liquor, allow it to settle, and then pass it through a fine sieve to clarify it. Take an onion, chop it up finely, and fry gently so that it does not color at all. Pour on a little of the crayfish liquor and also a little wine, and boil for three minutes. Next put in a lump of butter worked into some breadcrumbs and finely-chopped parsley to thicken it, and finally add a little cayenne and the juice of a lemon. Place the crayfish on a dish and pour the sauce over.
Oscar gives no measurements at all, in the manner of a professional kitchen note rather than a household recipe. The essentials are a short, hard boil in wine and a sauce built entirely from the cooking liquor.
- The hinge: cook them briefly"Boil with wine until done" means five to eight minutes for live crayfish, until the shells are uniformly red and the tails curl tight. Held longer they turn cottony, and the sauce depends on their liquor rather than on long extraction.
- Quantity of wineThe recipe specifies only "wine" and gives no amount; white is the usual choice for a marini e. Enough to come halfway up the crayfish, roughly a cup for a dozen, plus a little more reserved for the sauce, is a workable modern reading. The liquor is strained and reduced later, so keep it clean of aromatics you do not want in the finished sauce.
- Clarifying the liquor"Allow it to settle" means letting the grit and coagulated albumen drop before decanting the clear liquid off the top, then straining. A coffee filter or damp muslin does this faster than a sieve alone.
- The onionSweat one small onion, finely chopped, over low heat for eight to ten minutes without browning; the recipe does not say in what fat, though butter suits the sauce that follows. Any colour at all pushes the sauce toward sweetness and muddies it.
- The thickeningThe recipe gives no quantities; a "lump of butter" can reasonably be read as about 2 tablespoons, worked cold into 2 to 3 tablespoons of fine fresh breadcrumbs with a tablespoon of chopped parsley. Adding it in pieces with the pan off the boil helps the butter emulsify rather than split; stale dry crumbs will make it pasty.
- SeasoningThe recipe calls for a little cayenne and the juice of a whole lemon; for a dozen crayfish half a lemon may be enough, so add it last, off the heat, and taste.
- YieldThe recipe calls for a dozen or two crayfish. A dozen makes a first course for one; two dozen will serve two. Serve in a shallow dish with bread, and finger bowls or napkins, since the shells are peeled at the table.
Marinière means sailor-fashion, and in nineteenth-century French cooking it was most often applied to shellfish simmered in white wine with onion and parsley — mussels most famously, but also écrevisses. Freshwater crayfish were a luxury of the classic repertoire, appearing as garnish, in bisques, and as écrevisses à la nage, and American hotel kitchens of Oscar Tschirky's era drew directly on that French vocabulary; the Waldorf's clientele expected the menu language of Paris. The dish also reflects the older habit of thickening a sauce with breadcrumbs and butter rather than flour. European crayfish stocks were being badly reduced by crayfish plague through the closing decades of the 1800s, which is part of why American and, later, Louisiana crawfish came to fill the same culinary place.