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Salpicon of Crayfish
Put one pint of bechamel sauce into a saucepan with four mushrooms, one truffle, and the meat from three crayfish, all cut into dice; thicken well, let it cook for five or six minutes, and then serve.
A one-line professional note rather than a home recipe: it assumes you already have béchamel standing in the sauce station and crayfish already cooked and picked. A few things need translating before it works on a domestic stove.
- Quantities and yieldOne pint is 2 cups of finished béchamel — enough to fill a good many bouchées or small vol-au-vent cases; it is a garnish, not a main dish.
- The solids-to-sauce ratioThree crayfish yield perhaps an ounce of tail meat, which is lost in 2 cups of sauce. A modern salpicon tends toward roughly equal parts diced solids and binding sauce, so figure on considerably more crayfish than three if you want the dish to taste of crayfish.
- "Cut into dice"Salpicon means uniform small dice, about 1/4 inch. Cut the mushrooms and truffle to match the crayfish meat so the mixture holds a shape on a spoon.
- "Thicken well"This is the hinge. Reduce the béchamel until it coats the back of a spoon and just barely mounds — a slack salpicon soaks its pastry case. Reduce before the crayfish goes in, not after.
- Five or six minutesThat is time for the sauce to tighten and the mushrooms to give up their liquid. The crayfish meat is already cooked; more than a couple of minutes in hot sauce and it turns cottony, so fold it in at the end.
- TruffleOne fresh black truffle is optional in practice. Canned or jarred truffle is thin stuff; a spoonful of truffle juice or a few drops of good truffle oil off the heat does more than a tinned slice.
- CrayfishBoiled crawfish tails, fresh or frozen, are the practical source. Langoustine or shrimp substitutes cleanly; lobster is closer in texture but sweeter.
- SeasoningOscar gives none. Béchamel reduced with mushrooms needs salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, and lemon juice at the end to lift the shellfish.
Salpicon came into French kitchen French from Spanish, where it names a mixture of chopped meat; by the nineteenth century it meant specifically a fine dice bound in a thick sauce, ready to fill croustades, bouchées, timbales, or croquettes. It is a building block rather than a dish, which is why Oscar Tschirky's entry runs to a single sentence and assumes a stocked kitchen. Freshwater crayfish — écrevisses — were a standard luxury garnish in grand hotel cooking of the 1890s, appearing in bisques, in the classic garnish à la Nantua, and as a red-shelled flourish on the rim of a platter. American menus of the period drew on European supply and on native species; the Gulf crawfish that dominate today's market were then largely a regional food, and seldom seen as a hotel ingredient.