No. 1012

Crawfish with Cream

Ecrevisses a la Creme

After having prepared and washed three dozen crawfish as No. 1007, place them in a saucepan with a good sized piece of very fresh butter, a bunch of chives and parsley garnished with thyme, bay leaf and basil, a minced onion, two cloves, mushroom parings, a little salt and pepper; moisten with a small ladleful of vegetable stock (No. 195), and set the covered saucepan on a very hot fire for ten minutes, tossing the contents frequently; after this is done, take them from the fire and drain in a colander. Break off all the small legs and the shell from the tails, then lay the crawfish in a saucepan with their own strained stock, to keep hot without boiling. Just when ready to serve, drain, and set them into a silver tureen, one on top of the other, the tails inward, and the heads reclining against the sides of the tureen, and cover over with a lean unctuous bechamel sauce (No. 409), reduced with the broth in which the crawfish were cooked.

EDIBLE SNAILS (Escargots).

A shelled snail. The snails intended for eating are those that feed on aromatic plants. They are nourishing, but difficult to digest, are unsuitable for weak stomachs, and always require to be well seasoned. Broths are made from snails and are found to be very soothing for any irritability of the stomach.

← No. 1011 Crawfish with Butter Crawfish No. 1013 Edible Snails, to Prepare →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook with a stockpot going and a fish station at hand. The dish is straightforward once you know what No. 1007 and No. 409 stand in for, and once you stop cooking the crawfish as long as he says.

The hinge: cooking timeTen minutes on a very hot fire will leave the tail meat tough and stringy. Live crawfish of ordinary size are done in three to five minutes once the pan is covered and steaming; pull them the moment the shells turn uniformly red and the tails curl.
What No. 1007 meansThe referenced preparation is the cleaning and gutting of live crawfish. The standard method was to remove the intestinal vein by gripping the centre tail fin, twisting and pulling it free just before cooking; skipping it can leave a bitter thread.
Three dozenAbout 36 crawfish is a first course for four, or a light main for two. Live weight runs roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb for that count, yielding only a few ounces of picked tail meat, which is why the heads are left on for presentation.
A small ladlefulRead this as no more than about half a cup of stock. The crawfish release liquid as they steam and you want a concentrated pan broth, not a poaching liquid.
Mushroom paringsA professional kitchen kept the peelings and stalks from turned mushrooms for exactly this. Substitute two or three whole cremini, sliced, or a few dried mushrooms; they are there for savour in the broth, not to be eaten.
The bunch of chives and parsleyRead this as a bouquet, with the thyme, bay and basil bound in with it so it lifts out whole. The two cloves can be tied into the bouquet as well, which saves fishing for them out of the broth later.
Lean unctuous bechamel"Lean" here means made on a light stock or milk without meat glaze; "unctuous" means reduced until it coats. Make about a cup of bechamel, then reduce the strained crawfish broth hard and whisk it in until the sauce naps a spoon.
Keeping hot without boilingOnce peeled, the tails are held in their own strained liquor below a simmer. Boiling at this stage is what ruins the dish, since the meat is already cooked through and will seize.
The snail paragraphThe text on escargots at the end belongs to the following entry, No. 1013, and has nothing to do with the crawfish. It has run on in this transcription.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads like a French kitchen manual because that is what it is: numbered recipes cross-referencing numbered stocks and sauces, on the model of Careme and Gouffe. Crawfish had a settled place in that tradition, where ecrevisses were cooked whole in an aromatic court-bouillon and served heads-out in a tureen or piled as a garnish for larger fish dishes; the ornamental arrangement Ranhofer describes, tails inward and heads against the rim, is the classic buisson or bush presentation, meant to be looked at before it is eaten. The European crayfish that supplied French kitchens was already becoming scarce by the time this book appeared, its decline generally traced to the crayfish plague that spread through continental waters from the 1860s onward, and American restaurants increasingly worked with native species instead. The stray note on snails that follows belongs to the next entry, and its warning that they are "unsuitable for weak stomachs" is a reminder of how routinely nineteenth-century cookbooks doubled as guides to digestion.