No. 2211

Border of Fish Forcemeat a la Duchess with Crawfish Tails and Morils

Bordure de Farce de Poisson a la Duchesse aux Queues d'Ecrevisses et Morilles

Prepare a not too light cream fish forcemeat (No. 76) with some pike meat; also prepare a plentiful garnishing with good morils blanched and cooked, unshelled crawfish tails, slices from the tails of small freshly cooked lobsters, and poached oysters; lay all of these in a flat saucepan, and keep covered. Half an hour before serving fill a fancy border mold with the prepared forcemeat, and poach for twenty-five minutes in a bain-marie. Besides this put on to reduce three gills of veloute sauce (No. 415), incorporating into it slowly a few spoonfuls of good court bouillon (No. 38), and the oyster and crawfish broth; when this sauce becomes succulent, strain it over the garnishing, heat up without boiling, and finish with a piece of red butter (No. 580). At the last moment turn the border over on a hot dish and fill the center with the garnishings, dressing them in a dome without any sauce; on this lay four pretty cooked crawfish, having them whole, only the tails being shelled; place a small round truffle on the summit, and serve the sauce apart.

← No. 2210 Border of Chicken Forcemeat Filled with Chic Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2212 Border of Risot Valenciennes →

For the Modern Kitchen

A grand-service showpiece from Delmonico's kitchen: a ring of poached fish mousseline unmolded around a mound of shellfish and morels. Nearly all the work is in the forcemeat and the temperature you poach it at.

The hinge: never let the bain-marie boilA cream forcemeat is fragile; water at a rolling boil will curdle the cream out of it and leave the border grainy and weeping. Keep the surrounding water at a bare shiver, and judge the border by feel -- set and springy right through -- rather than trusting the flat twenty-five minutes.
Test before you commitPoach a teaspoon of the forcemeat in simmering water before filling the mold. If it falls apart, it needs more egg white or a longer beating; if it is rubbery, more cream. Ranhofer's "not too light" means firm enough to hold a molded ring when turned out.
Pike, and what to use insteadNorthern pike is the classic quenelle fish, traditionally prized because its flesh is lean and binds a mousseline well. Walleye, pickerel, whiting, haddock or sole all work. Whatever you use, it must be scrupulously free of bone and sinew and kept very cold through the food processor.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of velouté is one and a half cups. Reduced with court bouillon and the shellfish liquors it will finish at roughly a cup of sauce, enough to nap the garnish and still send some to table.
Morels"Morils" are morels. They must be blanched and cooked through, as the recipe directs, since raw or barely warmed morels reliably cause stomach upset. Dried morels, soaked and then simmered, are the practical modern option; strain their soaking liquid through cloth and add it to the sauce.
Red butterNo. 580 is a compound butter pounded with lobster or crawfish shells and coral, then strained. Whisk it into the sauce off the heat at the very end; if the sauce boils after it goes in, the butter breaks and the color dulls.
Oyster timingPoach the oysters only until their edges ruffle, well under a minute, then lift them out and save the liquor for the sauce. Held in the flat pan and reheated with everything else, they will already be at the edge of toughening.
CrawfishWhole crawfish for the garnish are for looks; buy them live or frozen cooked, and shell the tail meat for the interior while leaving four intact except for the tail shell. If crawfish are unavailable, small shrimp stand in for the meat, though not for the presentation.
Mold and yieldA "fancy border mold" is a decorated ring mold; a plain 6-cup savarin or bundt-style ring will do. Butter it heavily and line the bottom with a buttered paper disc cut to shape. Made at this scale the dish serves six to eight as a course.

A Little History

This is No. 2211 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a whole family of bordures in that book: rings of forcemeat, rice or potato turned out on a hot dish and filled with a ragout. The form made sense under service à la russe, where a dish had to look composed on a platter as it was carried down a long table and then be portioned by a waiter. "À la duchesse" attached itself in nineteenth-century French kitchens to preparations piped or molded into shape, most familiarly the egg-enriched pommes duchesse, and here it may well signal the molded forcemeat rather than any particular flavoring, though that is inference rather than established fact. The filling is a fair picture of what a New York kitchen could buy in the 1890s: oysters by the barrel, small lobsters, and crawfish, set against morels and a truffle for the summit. Pike as the base for quenelle forcemeat is a Lyonnais habit that French chefs carried with them wherever they worked, on the reasoning that its lean flesh binds cream well.