No. 1011

Crawfish with Butter

Ecrevisses au Beurre

Select four or five dozen large, live, and well cleaned crawfish; put them inside a net and plunge this into a large vessel containing boiling water, in order to kill the crawfish at once. Drain them well, then break off all their small legs; melt some butter, having a sufficiency of it, according to the quantity of crawfish; pour off the top of it only into a saucepan, and cook it until it becomes nut brown, then add to it the crawfish, a bunch of parsley, aromatic herbs, some cut up onions and pepper corns; let cook while tossing for ten minutes, drain and put them back in the saucepan besprinkle with a handful of white and fresh bread-crumbs; pour over two or three gills of mirepoix stock (No. 419); remove the saucepan to a slower fire to let the crawfish cook for a few moments longer, but without ceasing to toss. Take them from the fire, trim them and add to the sauce some sherry and small bits of butter for the purpose of thickening it. Dress the crawfish on a deep dish, and pour the sauce over.

← No. 1010 Crawfish, Maison d'Or Crawfish No. 1012 Crawfish with Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes clarified butter, a stocked garde-manger and crawfish that arrive alive in a net. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the timings need translating.

"Pour off the top of it only"This is clarified butter: melt the butter, let it settle, and use only the clear golden fat, leaving the milky solids behind. Those solids are what scorch and turn bitter when you take the butter to noisette, or nut brown.
GillsOne gill is half a cup, so two or three gills of stock is 1 to 1 1/2 cups. That is enough to glaze the crawfish and moisten the crumbs, not to poach them.
Mirepoix stockNo. 419 is a stock built on diced root vegetables and aromatics with ham or bacon and herbs, strained. A well-made shellfish or light veal stock with a spoonful of finely diced sweated mirepoix will do the same work.
Live crawfishBuy them alive and discard any that are limp or unresponsive; shellfish that die before cooking spoil quickly. Purge them in a tub of clean cold water for a few minutes and rinse until the water runs clear before they go into the pot.
The ten minutesLarger crawfish in the shell will take this, but the small Louisiana crawfish sold in most of North America generally need far less, only a few minutes of tossing. Past that the tail meat tightens, so judge by the meat and not by the clock.
Finishing the sauceAdd the sherry and the butter with the pan off direct heat and swirl it in. If the sauce boils after the butter goes in it will separate into oil and stock rather than thickening.
"Trim them"Ranhofer does not say what this involves; most likely it is tidying the cooked crawfish for the dish, pulling off remaining small legs and straightening the tails, and it would be sensible to remove the head sac and the dark intestinal thread from any to be eaten from the shell.
YieldFour or five dozen crawfish will make a generous first course for a small party, or fewer servings if treated as a main dish with bread to soak up the sauce; the recipe gives no yield. Serve it in a deep dish with finger bowls or napkins; this is eaten with the hands.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a run of crawfish dishes that shows how seriously the nineteenth-century restaurant took a small freshwater shellfish. The French term écrevisse covered the European crawfish that supplied the coulis, butters and garnishes of classical cookery, and American kitchens of the period drew on native species from Northern rivers and lakes as well as the Louisiana marshes. The technique here is pure haute cuisine of the era: butter cooked to the hazelnut stage for flavor, aromatics tossed rather than simmered, bread-crumbs to bind, and a mirepoix-based stock finished with sherry and cold butter. The crawfish themselves are trimmed and sauced, served in the shell.