No. 2341

Shells Filled with Crawfish Tails

Coquilles Garnies de Queues d'Ecrevisses

Prepare a salpicon with the meats picked from the large claws and the tails of crawfish; add to it a third as much cooked mushrooms, cut in dice shape, and mingle with some good reduced thick bechamel sauce (No. 409); with this fill eight or ten silver or china table shells (Fig. 438); smooth the preparation to a dome and cover with a layer of the cream fish forcemeat (No. 76). Range the shells on a small baking sheet, dredge the forcemeat with grated parmesan and brown for five minutes under the salamander (Fig. 123); keep the shells hot at the oven door for five minutes longer, then dress them symmetrically on a wooden foundation covered with white paper; surround this foundation with green parsley leaves.

← No. 2340 Shells of Oysters a la Villa Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2342 Shells Filled with Shrimps and Oyster Crabs →

For the Modern Kitchen

A gratin of crawfish in reduced bechamel, capped with fish mousseline and browned. The only genuinely fussy element is the forcemeat lid, and it can be simplified without losing the dish.

SalpiconSimply a mixture of ingredients cut into small, even dice and bound with a sauce. Here it is picked crawfish tail and claw meat plus a third its volume of cooked diced mushrooms, folded into just enough sauce to hold together.
How much crawfishRanhofer gives no quantity. For eight to ten shells you will want somewhere around a pound of picked meat; whole live crawfish yield only a small fraction of their weight in tail meat, so allow several pounds, or start with frozen tail meat plus whatever claw meat you can get.
The sauce must be thick"Good reduced thick bechamel" is the hinge. If the sauce is pourable the filling will not hold a dome and will boil out from under the forcemeat. Reduce it until a spoon drawn through leaves a clean track, then cool it slightly before mixing.
Cream fish forcemeatNo. 76 is Ranhofer's cream forcemeat, a mousseline-type preparation of pounded raw white fish worked with cold cream. A food processor does it quickly, but keep everything cold or the cream breaks. Check the proportions given at No. 76 rather than guessing.
ShellsSilver and china table shells were serving vessels, not cookware; the recipe points to Fig. 438. Natural scallop shells or small individual gratin dishes work identically; size them so eight to ten hold the filling with room for the forcemeat cap.
Salamander means broilerAn overhead gas or electric broiler at full heat, rack close. Five minutes browns the parmesan; the further five minutes 'at the oven door' is gentle residual heat to set the raw forcemeat through. Do not skip it, and check that the mousseline is firm to the touch.
Yield and serviceEight to ten shells, one per person as a first course or light entrée. The wooden plank under white paper with parsley around it is nineteenth-century banquet presentation; a warm platter is enough.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York across two separate stints, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire written down, cross-referenced by number the way a professional brigade actually used it. Coquilles — fillings served in and eaten from a shell — filled a whole run of numbers in the Miscellaneous Entrées chapter because they solved a banquet problem neatly: the components could be prepared in advance, assembled to order, and browned in seconds under the salamander. Crawfish, or écrevisses, were a staple of the French luxury kitchen long before Louisiana crawfish reached national markets; American cooks of the period took them from freshwater streams and lakes, and the labor of picking the tails and cracking the large claws is the kind of expense a restaurant kitchen could absorb and one a home cook may well have found harder to justify. That labor, rather than any rare ingredient, is what made a dish like this expensive.