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Crayfish Sauce
Moisten one-fourth of a pound each of flour and butter with a little water, and the liquor that any fish has been cooked in (having the fat removed), and with them make a sauce. When it begins to thicken while boiling add three ounces of fresh butter, a small lump of crayfish butter, and five tablespoonfuls of crayfish tails and claws, either cut up in small dice, or put in whole.
This is a classic white roux sauce enriched at the end with compound butter, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen that had fish stock and crayfish butter standing ready. Two things carry it: a well-cooked roux moistened with genuine fish cooking liquor, and butter added off the boil.
- Crayfish butter is a separate preparationBeurre d'écrevisses is generally made by pounding the cooked shells and heads with butter (commonly about an equal weight), warming gently, then straining into iced water so the tinted butter sets and can be lifted off. The recipe assumes you already have it; it supplies much of the sauce's colour and aroma.
- Quantities and scaleFour ounces each of flour and butter makes a large quantity of sauce; at roughly 1 oz flour to 1 cup liquid for a coating consistency that is several cups' worth. The recipe gives no yield. Halved or quartered it behaves the same.
Crayfish sauce belongs to the French repertoire in which a sauce Nantua or its plainer cousins dressed poached sole, pike quenelles and turbot. Freshwater crayfish were a familiar market item in parts of the United States and Europe, and the shells — which carry much of the aroma — were commonly pounded into butter rather than discarded. The technique of finishing a flour-thickened sauce with a pounded shellfish butter appears in nineteenth-century French practice before Escoffier, and the terse instruction here, with no mention of salt, straining or resting, suggests notes for cooks who already knew the method.