No. 2629

Crawfish Salad a la Maintenon

Salade d'Ecrevisses 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.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a grand cold buffet piece rather than a salad in the modern sense: a mounded fish salpicon, masked in jellied mayonnaise and shingled with crawfish tails. It depends on three separate preparations cross-referenced elsewhere in Ranhofer, and on everything staying cold.

The hinge: temperatureNothing here will hold its shape unless the salpicon, the sauces and the finished dome are kept genuinely cold throughout. Ranhofer's kitchens worked in a cool larder with ice on hand; a warm modern kitchen will slump the dome and thin the jelly before you finish sticking in the tails. Build in stages, returning the piece to the refrigerator between each, and keep the half-set jelly in a bowl over ice.
The wooden baseThe "wooden bottom" fastened to the dish, with its outer ledge and central support, serves the purpose of a socle: a plinth that raises and steadies the display. Paper-covered wood is not a food surface by current standards; a rice-flour or bread socle, or simply a chilled shallow bowl inverted on the platter, gives the same lift. Nothing built on the socle should be eaten from where it touches.
Crawfish quantitySix to eight dozen large crawfish will yield perhaps 1 to 1½ lb of picked tail meat, plus the claw scraps that go into the stuffing. About fifteen whole body shells are reserved for stuffing, so buy whole cooked crawfish rather than picked tails.
"Suppress" and other FrenchismsRanhofer translated supprimer literally: it means remove or discard. "Pare the meat" means trim it neatly, saving the trimmings, which are used again in the stuffing.
Ingredient namesTunny-fish is tuna, here marinated rather than canned in the modern sense. Salt cucumbers are brined pickling cucumbers, closer to a half-sour than a sweet gherkin. Poached eggs in a cold salpicon means eggs poached firm and cut in quarter-inch dice, not soft.
The cross-referenced saucesThree are needed: a white chaudfroid (a velouté or béchamel set with aspic) to bind the stuffing; a mayonnaise with jelly, that is mayonnaise slackened with melted aspic so it sets to a coating; and plain mayonnaise sent separately to table. Use a firm commercial aspic or a well-clarified fish stock set with gelatin.
Setting timesThe half-hour and quarter-hour chills assume a proper ice-box. In a modern refrigerator at 38F they are about right, but the jellied mayonnaise coating benefits from longer, and any coating applied to a warm surface will slide.
The larding needleIt is used only as a handle here, to place each tail without fingerprinting the coated dome. A thin skewer or fine offset tweezers does the same work.
YieldThe original gives none. As the centrepiece of a cold table this serves 12 to 16; as a plated course, about 8.

A Little History

À la Maintenon honours Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon, the second, morganatic wife of Louis XIV, whose name was attached to a scatter of dishes with no consistent method between them beyond a certain courtly finish; the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and she is unlikely to have eaten anything of the sort. The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to the tradition of architectural cold work inherited from Carême: food built upward on a socle, masked in chaudfroid or jellied mayonnaise, and finished with a symmetry that had to survive the trip from larder to buffet. Ranhofer uses the crawfish here as ornament as much as substance, the scarlet tails set in graduated rows against a pale dome, with a sauceboat of plain mayonnaise going to the table alongside.