Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Matelote Garnish
Matelote Garnish
This is composed of carp's soft roes, mussels, crayfish, mushrooms, truffles and onions, prepared as follows: Boil some soft roes of carp, blanch some mussels, cook some crayfish, and take out the meat from the tails, keeping them whole; glaze some truffles, mushrooms and small onions. Should the garnish be required to be dished in heaps, matelote sauce must be served in a sauceboat; but if it is to be served otherwise, all the ingredients should be put into a sautepan with some matelote sauce, and stirred over the fire for a few minutes, so as to thicken the sauce.
A component recipe rather than a dish: this is the classic French garniture matelote, meant to finish a fish stew or a poached whole fish. Oscar gives no quantities, so scale to the number of servings and treat each element as its own small preparation.
- Soft roes are milt, not eggs"Soft roe" (French laitance) is the milt of a male fish, a pale lobed organ with a texture between custard and brain. Carp milt is hard to source outside specialist or Eastern European fishmongers; herring milt, sold frozen in many Asian and Nordic markets, is the usual stand-in. Poach it gently in salted, acidulated water for two or three minutes only, as it collapses if boiled hard.
- Matelote sauce is the whole pointThe recipe assumes you already have it. It is a red-wine fish sauce: a reduction of red wine and fish stock with aromatics, bound with a fish velout dm or, in simpler versions, with beurre mani ds, and finished with butter; some versions add a little brandy. Without it the garnish is just a plate of assorted seafood.
- Blanching musselsSteam them in a covered pan with a splash of the wine until they open, a matter of two to four minutes, then shell them and strain and reserve the liquor for the sauce. Discard any that stay shut. Reheating shelled mussels for more than a moment in the finished sauce turns them to rubber.
- CrayfishBoil live crayfish briefly in court-bouillon, three to five minutes, then peel the tails whole and devein. The heads and shells are worth pounding into butter or simmering into the sauce base rather than throwing away.
- "Glaze" the vegetablesHere glazing means cooking the button mushrooms, peeled pearl onions and turned truffle pieces in butter with a little stock and sugar until the liquid reduces to a shining film. It is not browning under a broiler.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle at garnish quantities is a luxury few will match; a modest amount shaved in at the end, off the heat, gives more aroma than the cooked, glazed treatment Oscar describes. Truffle-flavoured oils are a different flavour altogether and do not substitute.
- The two serving methodsDished in heaps means the elements are grouped separately around the fish and the sauce passed at table, which keeps the mussels and roe intact. Bound together, everything goes into the sautepan with the sauce for two or three minutes, no more, purely to coat and thicken.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a rough working estimate for a whole poached fish serving six, something like a pound of mussels in the shell, a dozen crayfish, a dozen small onions, a cup of button mushrooms and four to six pieces of soft roe.
Matelote comes from matelot, the French for sailor, and is traditionally said to have meant a freshwater fish stew cooked in wine by boatmen along the Loire, the Seine and the Marne, usually with eel and carp from the river at hand. By the nineteenth century professional kitchens had codified it: Escoffier lists matelote as both a stew and a standard garnish, and published garnish formulas commonly call for glazed onions, mushrooms and crayfish, with soft roes, mussels and truffles varying by author — the sort of thing a French-trained chef of Oscar Tschirky's generation would have understood by the word without further explanation. That is why the entry reads as a list of components rather than a dish — it belongs to the section of the Waldorf's repertoire that assumes a brigade with stock, velouté and sauce already at the stove. It also records a moment when freshwater fish and crayfish had a place on grand American hotel menus.