Crawfish Salad a la Maintenon

In order to dress this salad in an elegant manner, and with a required solidity, it is better to fasten a wooden bottom to the dish, covering it with white paper and having on the upper outer edge a small wooden or cardboard ledge, and in the center a thin support equally covered with white paper. Detach the tails from the bodies of six or eight dozen large, cooked crawfish; suppress the tail shells and claws. Pare the meat from the tails, put it into a bowl, and season with salt, oil and vinegar; empty the crawfish bodies, and rub the insides through a sieve. Stuff about fifteen of these bodies, when well cleaned, with a salpicon composed of poached oysters and cooked truffles; mix in with it the meats from the claws, and the parings from the tails, and stir in a good white chaudfroid sauce (No. 596). Let the preparation become firm by keeping the stuffed bodies for half an hour in the refrigerator. Cut in small quarter-inch squares some cooked and cold fillets of sole and salmon, also some anchovy and herring fillets, some marinated tunny-fish, poached eggs, potatoes and salt cucumbers; put this salpicon into a bowl, and season it with salt, oil, vinegar and mustard, then let macerate for one hour. Drain off the seasoning, and add to it a mayonnaise with jelly (No. 613). Dress it dome-shaped on the wood fastened to the dish, and let it get firm for a quarter of an hour in the ice-box; remove the dish from the ice, and cover the dome with a layer of jellied mayonnaise(613). Stick in the crawfish tails one by one, with the point of a larding needle so that they lay symmetrically against the dome in two graduated rows; cover them at once with half-set jelly, and garnish the hollow of the second or top row with a bunch of green leaves or a bunch of chopped jelly. Send a sauce-boat of mayonnaise (No. 606) to the table at the same time.