No. 1189

Lamprey a la Rabelais

Lamproie a la Rabelais

Bleed the lamprey, reserving the blood, and mix it in with a little vinegar; cut the fish into slices, fry them in butter adding chopped onions, salt, sugar, and allspice; dredge over with a little flour, moisten with white wine, and lay in a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf, also small glazed onions; let cook from twelve to fifteen minutes. Dress the lampreys and the small onions, thicken the sauce with the blood and then strain it through a tammy (No. 159); cover the fish with this sauce, and surround the lampreys with fluted mushroom heads (No. 118) fried in butter, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and fine herbs; range round the whole very thin sliced lemon.

← No. 1188 Lafayette Fish, Breaded English Style Eels, Pike, Carp & Sturgeon No. 1190 Fresh Mackerel →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's method turns on a liaison of raw lamprey blood, and that is precisely where the dish fails for a modern cook. The notes below explain the problem and gloss the terms, but this is a recipe to read rather than cook.

The blood liaison is the hazardThe blood liaison is the weak point -- lamprey serum, like eel serum, is reported to contain a heat-labile toxin that can cause vomiting and diarrhoea when consumed raw or barely heated. The recipe reserves the blood raw, holds it in vinegar, then stirs it into the sauce at the end as a thickener; a blood liaison of this kind is conventionally not boiled, since it curdles, so the one ingredient that would most benefit from sustained heat is the one least likely to get it.
Bleeding a live fish at homeBleeding the fish at home -- The instruction begins with bleeding the lamprey and reserving the blood, mixed with a little vinegar, until the sauce stage. The recipe gives no chilling instruction and no measured quantity of vinegar; it assumes a kitchen with a fishmonger and a cold room attached.
Sourcing and legal statusSea lamprey are a destructive invasive in the Great Lakes and are managed with lampricides rather than harvested for the table. In Britain and much of Europe brook and river lamprey are protected under habitats legislation, and sea lamprey fisheries are restricted. There is no ordinary retail source, and the fish taken from managed waters carries a contaminant history of its own.
A tammyA tammy or tammis is a fine worsted straining cloth, often twisted between two people to force a sauce through. It served the purpose later taken over by the chinois and fine sieve, and in Ranhofer it generally signals a sauce meant to be perfectly smooth.
Fluted mushroom headsCross-reference No. 118 in The Epicurean: mushroom caps carved with shallow curved channels, a decorative garnish of the classical repertoire that is now rarely seen.
Glazed onionsSmall peeled onions cooked in butter, a little sugar and stock until the liquid reduces to a shine. Sugar also appears in the frying stage here, alongside the vinegar in the blood, which suggests a sweet-sour direction to the seasoning.
If you want the dishA current, tested recipe from a source with an accountable supply chain is the only reasonable route to anything resembling this. Do not adapt the version above.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a compendium of the grand French repertoire as it was practised in America, and the Rabelais attribution is a nod backwards rather than a claim of authorship: François Rabelais, the sixteenth-century author of Gargantua and Pantagruel, is a byword in French gastronomic naming for enormous, unembarrassed appetite, and lamprey was among the luxury fish of his period. The jawless, eel-shaped lamprey was prized through the Middle Ages and Renaissance for its rich flesh, and for the practice of thickening its own sauce with its own blood — a technique it shares with lamproie à la bordelaise, still cooked in the Gironde with red wine and leeks. Henry I of England is traditionally said to have died of a surfeit of lampreys in 1135, a story repeated by chroniclers well after the fact and impossible to verify, but it fixed the fish in the popular imagination as food of dangerous excess. The dish appears here in a chapter that ranges across eel, pike, carp and sturgeon — the river-and-estuary fish that classical French cookery treated with elaborate sauces.