No. 1007

Crawfish a la Bateliere

Ecrevisses a la Bateliere

Procure three dozen live crawfish, wash them thoroughly, place them in a net, and plunge them for two minutes into plenty of boiling water in order to kill them, then remove and break off the small legs. Fry three very finely chopped shallots in butter with six ounces of minced mushrooms, thyme and bay leaf, add the crawfish and moisten with white wine; let cook for ten minutes, suppress the thyme and bay leaf, season with salt and red pepper, and just when prepared to serve add half an ounce of fresh butter and some chopped parsley.

← No. 1006 Soft Shell Crabs, Broiled, Ravigote Butter, Crawfish No. 1008 Crawfish a la Bordelaise →

For the Modern Kitchen

A short, wine-forward crawfish saute from Ranhofer's The Epicurean. The whole thing takes under twenty minutes once the crawfish are purged, and the only real decisions are how much wine to use and when to stop cooking.

The hinge: two minutes is a kill, not a cookThe initial plunge only dispatches the crawfish and firms the shells; the actual cooking is the ten minutes in wine. Treat the blanch as a dip and pull the net promptly, or the tail meat will be stringy by the time the dish is finished.
Quantity and yieldThree dozen crawfish is roughly 2 lb whole, which yields only a few ounces of picked tail meat. Served in the shell with the pan juices and bread, it feeds two generously or four as a first course.
The wine is unmeasured"Moisten with white wine" is genuinely open in the original. About a cup for three dozen gives enough liquid to steam them and reduce to a short sauce; more than that and you are poaching rather than braising. A dry white with acid, not an oaked one.
"Suppress" means removeRanhofer's English follows the French supprimer, using suppress for discarding an ingredient. Fish out the thyme and bay leaf before seasoning.
Red pepperRead as cayenne, used sparingly as seasoning rather than as heat; Ranhofer names paprika separately where he wants it.
Breaking off the small legsThis is cosmetic and practical, removing the walking legs so the crawfish sit neatly and there is less to negotiate at table. The classical repertoire also calls for pulling the intestinal vein by twisting off the middle tail fin, though Ranhofer does not mention it here.
The final butterThe half ounce of fresh butter goes in off the heat, swirled until it emulsifies into the reduced wine. If the pan is still boiling it will separate into oil and leave the sauce thin.
MushroomsSix ounces minced mushrooms is a substantial amount and will give up a good deal of water. Cook them down in the butter with the shallots until that moisture is gone before the wine goes in, or the sauce will not concentrate.
ServingFinger food. Bring the pan to the table with plenty of bread for the juices and something for the shells.

A Little History

À la batelière is conventionally rendered "boatman's style" (from batelier, a boatman or ferryman; the feminine form agrees with an implied mode or façon rather than denoting a woman), one of a large family of nineteenth-century French garnish names that gestured at riverside cooking and freshwater catch — crawfish, eel, small fish in wine. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 and gave crawfish a section of their own with several preparations in sequence: this one, the better-known à la Bordelaise, and others. The écrevisses of the classical repertoire were the European crayfish, whose stocks were already being cut back by crayfish plague from the 1860s onward, with heavy losses continuing in the decades around and after this book; American cooks working from it would likely have used native species, and today's cook almost certainly buys Louisiana or imported crawfish. The technique here — shallots and mushrooms sweated in butter, white wine, herbs pulled out at the end, butter swirled in off the heat — is a standard short French braise for shellfish, and it survives in much the same form today.