Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Crayfish Omelet
Crayfish Omelet
Take the tails of two dozen boiled crayfish, and cut them up into dice. Remove the meat from the claws, chop it up with the trimmings of the tails, and an equal quantity of fresh mushrooms; put them into a basin, and add ten eggs, a little salt and nutmeg to season, and a small pinch of finely-chopped parsley; whip them well for three minutes. Warm four ounces of butter in an omelet-pan, add the eggs, etc. let it thicken a trifle, and then put the tails--previously mixed with one tablespoonful of white sauce reduced with a little meat-glaze--in the center. When cooked remove the omelet, roll it up, put it into an oblong dish, and serve.
A rolled French omelet built around crayfish tails, scaled for a restaurant table rather than a family supper. The eggs are the whole difficulty: everything else is preparation.
- Scale and yieldTen eggs makes a single very large omelet, enough for five or six as a course. Two dozen crayfish yield only about 4 to 6 oz of picked meat, so the filling is a garnish rather than a bulk ingredient. If you halve the eggs, halve the crayfish too.
- The hinge: two pans, two mixturesNote that the chopped claw meat and mushrooms go into the eggs, while the diced tails are bound with sauce and placed in the center as a filling. Keeping them separate is the point of the dish; dumping everything in at once gives a scrambled hash.
- Sweat the mushrooms firstRaw chopped mushrooms stirred into egg release water as they cook and thin the omelet. Cook them in a little butter until they stop giving off liquid, cool them, and then add them to the eggs.
- Four ounces of butterThat is a full stick, appropriate to a wide steel omelet pan on a hotel range. A modern 12-inch nonstick pan needs 1 to 2 tablespoons; more will simply pool and leak out when you roll it.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande is veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A teaspoon of reduced demi-glace, or commercial glace de veau, does the same job: it darkens and deepens the tablespoon of white sauce holding the tails together.
- Heat and timingMedium heat, not high. "Let it thicken a trifle" means the eggs should still be visibly loose on top when the filling goes in, because the residual heat sets the interior as you roll. Cooking is quick -- a matter of a few minutes -- though a ten-egg omelet in a large pan will take longer than a small one.
- NutmegGrate it sparingly, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon for ten eggs. Nutmeg turns up often in period shellfish and cream dishes, but it turns soapy fast against delicate crayfish.
- Sourcing the crayfishLive crawfish are seasonal and regional; frozen cooked crawfish tail meat, thawed and drained, is the practical substitute. Buy about 6 oz of picked meat and skip the claw-picking, using a little of the same meat, finely chopped, in the egg mixture.
This is an omelette aux ecrevisses under an English name, squarely within the French restaurant repertoire. Crayfish were a common luxury garnish in nineteenth-century French cooking, simmered in a court-bouillon before the tails were picked for garnishing sauces, timbales and bisque. The tell-tale detail here is the meat-glaze: a hotel kitchen with reduced veal stock already on hand could spare a spoonful to enrich a tablespoon of white sauce, while a domestic reader would have had to make it from scratch. The omelet is rolled rather than folded and served on an oblong dish.