No. 202

Bisque of Crawfish a la Bateliere

Bisque d Ecrevisses a la Bateliere

After removing the fins from the middle of the tails as for a la Persigny (No. 204), wash forty-eight crawfish in several waters, drain them, mince some carrots, leeks, onions and celery root, fry them in butter and just on the eve of browning, mix in a quarter of a pound of flour; cook the flour for a few minutes, and then add the crawfish, some sprigs of parsley, two bay leaves, salt and mignonette, cover the saucepan and cook for fifteen minutes, tossing them several times, then drain. Pick out the meat from the tails, cut them in two and reserve them for the garnishing: pound the shells as well as the claws with twelve hard boiled egg-yolks, and when a good paste is obtained, moisten it with the thick stock, strained first through a sieve not too fine, and afterward through a tammy; moisten again with fat or lean broth. Should the bisque be required for a lean dinner; warm it up without boiling and incorporate in half a pound of crawfish butter with cayenne and half a gill of Madeira wine. Set the crawfish tails into a soup tureen and pour the bisque over, and when serving the soup put into each plate six pieces of bread a quarter of an inch square, fried in butter.

← No. 201 Bisque of Crawfish Soups & Broths No. 203 Bisque of Crawfish a la Humboldt →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade, a stockpot already going, and a cook who knows what a tammy is. The method is sound and still worth following; only the vocabulary and a few proportions need translating.

The hinge: never let it boil after the butter goes inThe finished bisque is enriched with a half pound of crawfish butter off the boil. Bring it above a bare simmer and the emulsion breaks into an oily, grainy soup that cannot be brought back. Warm it to about 170F, whisk the butter in a piece at a time, and hold it there.
"Removing the fins from the middle of the tails"This is deveining live crawfish: you pinch and pull the central tail fin, which draws out the intestinal tract. Doing it before cooking keeps bitterness out of the stock. It only works on live animals, so buy them live or accept that pre-cooked frozen tails will not give you the same result.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked white peppercorns, not a variety of onion or lettuce. Crack them under a pan rather than grinding fine.
Gill, and the MadeiraA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons. Add it at the end with the butter, off the heat, so the alcohol does not cook out entirely.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force purée through. Two layers of rinsed cheesecloth or a fine chinois with a ladle does the same job. The two-stage straining matters: the coarse sieve holds back shell fragments, the cloth catches the grit that would otherwise sit on the tongue.
Twelve hard-boiled yolksThese are the thickener, along with the quarter pound of flour in the roux. Pounded with the shells they give body and a particular richness modern bisques get from cream. The soup will look pale gold rather than pink until the crawfish butter goes in.
Crawfish butterNot a purchasable item. It is made by pounding the cooked shells with softened butter, melting the mixture gently, then straining and chilling it (traditionally into cold water) so the butter sets above the sediment. Budget the shells from a second batch of crawfish, or the tail shells you are already pounding will not go far enough.
"Fat or lean broth" and the lean dinnerFat broth is meat stock; lean means no meat at all, for fast days. If you want the Lenten version, moisten with fish fumet or crawfish shell stock and skip the veal or beef.
YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; forty-eight crawfish, with the tails halved for garnish, would stretch to a first course for a party of some size, but any figure is a guess. The fried bread is cut in quarter-inch dice, six to a plate, added at the table so they stay crisp.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter alone runs to several competing bisques of crawfish, each with a different name and garnish. "A la bateliere" is usually rendered "in the boatman's style" -- the feminine form agrees with an implied "mode" rather than naming a woman -- and French kitchens attached the label loosely to freshwater fish and shellfish dishes rather than to any single fixed formula. What dates the recipe is the thickening: hard-boiled egg yolks pounded with the shells, a technique inherited from earlier French practice, where bisques were bound with yolks, rice or pounded bread long before heavy cream became the default. The crawfish would most likely have been a native river species sold live in nineteenth-century city markets; the Louisiana farmed crawfish that dominate today's supply were not yet a commercial crop. The instruction to moisten with "fat or lean broth" reflects the Catholic calendar in a secular luxury restaurant, where a Friday or Lenten dinner still had to be served without meat.