Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Crayfish Patties
Crayfish Patties
Place two dozen crayfish into a stewpan with a little salt, a few peppercorns, some finely chopped vegetables, a bunch of parsley and a little vinegar or white wine; cover over the pan, place it on a good fire and when the fish have cooled a little remove the meat from the tails and claws and cut it up into small pieces, placing them in a small stewpan and thickening with a little white sauce. When wanted for serving fill a dozen or so of (bouchees) patties with the preparation and garnish with lobster coral and parsley.
A late-Victorian hotel canapé course: crayfish poached in a quick court bouillon, bound with sauce, and spooned into pastry shells at the last moment. The original assumes a garde-manger who already has stock, sauce and baked bouchées standing by.
- The hinge: cook them brieflyThe crayfish go into the pan with the aromatics, are covered and set on a good fire; once the liquid boils they need only a few minutes, until the tails curl and the shells turn red. The recipe gives no timing; overcooked tail meat turns cottony.
- What the aromatics amount toSalt, peppercorns, chopped vegetables, parsley and vinegar or white wine is essentially a court bouillon, though the recipe names no water and no quantities. If you extend it, a chopped carrot, an onion and a rib of celery with about half a cup of wine or a quarter cup of vinegar in water to cover is a reasonable reading; the bay leaf is an addition. The pan is covered so the crayfish steam as much as boil.
- Yield is smallTwo dozen crayfish give roughly 3 to 4 ounces of picked tail and claw meat, which is why the recipe stretches it with sauce to fill a dozen shells. Claw meat from smaller crayfish is barely worth the labour; some cooks pick tails only and pound the rest into butter.
- BouchéesThese are small puff pastry cases, baked hollow and about 2 inches across. Frozen puff pastry vol-au-vent shells are the direct modern substitute. Fill them warm and serve at once or the pastry softens.
- "A little white sauce"The recipe says no more than that; most likely a thick bechamel, or a velouty made with the strained cooking liquid, reduced enough to coat rather than run. Two to three tablespoons is plenty; the filling should be bound, not soupy. Whisking in a spoonful of crayfish butter made from the pounded shells is a classical enrichment.
- Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral red when cooked, then pressed through a sieve and used as a garnish. It is rarely available now; sieved hard egg yolk, a dusting of paprika, or the reserved orange roe from the crayfish themselves do the same visual job.
- Live crayfishBuy them live and keep them cold and damp until cooking. Purge in clean cold water for 20 to 30 minutes and discard any that are already dead. If using cooked frozen crayfish tails, skip the poaching entirely and use bottled clam juice or fish stock for the sauce.
- ServingA dozen bouchees serves six as a first course or fills a small tray of hors d'oeuvres. Season the finished filling with lemon and cayenne before it goes in; the recipe does not mention it.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms in the decades when American hotel cooking was essentially French cooking with American ingredients, and this is a textbook example: érevisses, a court bouillon, a sauce and a bouchée, all standard French professional vocabulary of the period, applied to a freshwater crustacean that was abundant in North American rivers and lakes — though the book records the house's dishes rather than Oscar's own work at the stove. Crayfish had long been a luxury garnish in French kitchens, where the tails went into garnishes like à la Nantua and the pounded shells into crayfish butter, and Oscar's readers were expected to recognise the shorthand rather than be taught it. The instruction to garnish with lobster coral is telling about the house: a kitchen that could reach for a hen lobster's roe simply to add colour to a tray of pastry shells was not economising. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the whole book, which reads less as a manual for home cooks than as a record of what the Waldorf sent out, set down for an audience that wanted to know how a famous kitchen worked.