No. 2342

Shells Filled with Shrimps and Oyster Crabs

Coquilles Garnies de Crevettes et de Crabes d'Huitres

Put the oyster crabs into a saucepan on the fire, with a little white wine, and when poached drain and lay them in a sautoir with the same amount of cooked and shelled shrimps fried in butter; add lean bechamel cream sauce (No. 411) that has been well seasoned; with this fill some buttered and breaded silver shells (Fig. 438) or else clean clam shells; throw bread-crumbs over, baste with butter and brown in a hot oven.

← No. 2341 Shells Filled with Crawfish Tails Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2343 Shells of Beef Palates a la Mariniere →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's shell entrée that depends almost entirely on two ingredients handled quickly and a sauce made stiff enough to hold them. Ranhofer's cross-references assume you have the rest of the book at hand, so the sauce is the first thing to settle.

Oyster crabsThese are the pea-sized soft crabs (Pinnotheres) that live inside oysters, once a by-product of commercial shucking and sold by the pint. They are effectively unobtainable now; a raw-bar shucker may save you a handful if asked. Small cooked bay shrimp or crawfish tails stand in without changing the method.
Poaching timeThe crabs need under a minute in the wine — they are done the moment the shells turn opaque pink. Anything longer and they collapse into grit. The shrimp likewise want only a quick turn in hot butter; they arrive already cooked.
The béchamel (No. 411)Ranhofer's "lean béchamel cream sauce" is a béchamel-type cream sauce; "lean" (maigre) conventionally means made without meat stock, i.e. meatless. Make it thick, since a thin sauce will run out of the shells in the oven.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any wide skillet does; here it simply holds the shellfish while the sauce is added.
ShellsThe silver coquilles of a nineteenth-century restaurant service correspond to modern gratin dishes or scallop shells. Real clam or scallop shells work if they are scrubbed and boiled first; butter them and dust with crumbs before filling, exactly as directed, or the gratin will weld itself to the shell.
Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally read as roughly 425–450°F. The filling is already cooked, so the point is to brown the crumbs rather than heat the dish through, and a few minutes under a broiler does much the same job with less risk of overcooking the shellfish.
Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. Figure about 1 cup total shellfish and 3/4 cup thick sauce to fill four medium shells, which serves four as a first course.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked in some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe sits among filled-shell entrées — crawfish tails, beef palates, lobster — of a kind often served as a light course. Oyster crabs explain why the dish belongs to that particular city and moment: they came from the oysters handled in New York's shucking houses, and were treated as a delicacy precisely because you needed an oyster trade to get any quantity. Fried in butter or bound in cream sauce, they appear all over American hotel menus of the 1880s and 1890s and remained a menu item well into the twentieth century. The gratinated shell itself was a useful piece of restaurant economy, a way of turning small amounts of expensive shellfish into a course that looked generous.