No. 2630

Crawfish Salad with Jelly

Salade d' Ecrevisses a la Gelee

Detach the tails from the bodies of several dozen cooked crawfish; suppress the shells from the tails and largest legs; pare the meats, season, and keep them covered. Prepare a macedoine salad (No. 2650), cut into small dice, add to it the legs and parings of shrimps, also cut in dice; season with salt, oil and vinegar, and let marinate for one hour. Select a plain border mold with a narrow cylinder, imbed it in broken ice, and decorate its sides with eggs cut in two, alternated with some small vegetable balls dipped in half-set jelly; fill up the empty space in the mold gradually with some partly cold jelly (No. 103). Drain the salad on a sieve, lay it back into the bowl and mix in with it a jellied mayonnaise (No. 613); stir it on ice for a few minutes. Unmold the border on a cold dish; place into the cylindrical space a wooden foundation of exactly the same diameter, having on the center a light upright support, both being covered with white paper; lay the salad around this support, giving it a pyramidical shape, smooth the surfaces, and cover it with a thin layer of thick jellied mayonnaise (No. 613); keep for two minutes on ice. Stick in the crawfish tails one by one, using a larding needle for the purpose, first dipping them in half-set jelly, then fasten them to the salad in three graduated rows, each one laying in a different direction, and forming a pyramid. As soon as each row is finished coat it over with some half-set jelly to consolidate it; in the hollow of the third or top row lay a pretty lettuce heart, and serve a sauce-boat of mayonnaise sauce (No. 606) at the same time as the salad.

← No. 2629 Crawfish Salad a la Maintenon Cooked Salads No. 2631 Fish Salads →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A Delmonico's showpiece rather than a bowl of salad: an aspic border, a jellied mayonnaise cone, and three tiers of crawfish tails pinned into place. It is buildable today, but the cross-references do most of the work and the whole thing depends on temperature control.

What the numbers stand forNo. 103 is Ranhofer's aspic jelly, No. 613 a mayonnaise stiffened with dissolved aspic, No. 606 plain mayonnaise, No. 2650 a macedoine of cooked diced vegetables. Substitute a firm, well-clarified savory gelatin stock and a mayonnaise loosened with a little of that stock before it sets.
Quantity of crawfish"Several dozen" is the only measure given. Tail meat runs roughly 15 percent of live weight, but the recipe states no mold size, yield or number of servings; scale to the border mold you have and to the three graduated rows of tails it must carry.
Cooking the crawfishThe recipe assumes them already cooked. Small crawfish need only a few minutes once the water returns to a boil, then an immediate chill; overcooked tails go dry and handle badly.
Archaic verbs"Suppress the shells" means remove them; "pare the meats" means trim the tails neat. The "parings of shrimps" is unclear and may be a translation slip for the crawfish legs and trimmings already set aside; any cooked shellfish trim serves.
The hinge: everything stays coldHalf-set jelly is the glue for the whole construction. Work with the mold in broken ice, keep the aspic at the syrupy stage where it coats a spoon but still flows, and return the piece to the refrigerator between rows. Warm aspic slides off; fully set aspic will not bond.
The wooden supportA paper-covered wooden cone is not a food-contact material anyone would use now. Build the pyramid over a small inverted ramekin or a cone of stiff acetate, or simply mound the salad and let the gelatin hold it.
Larding needleUsed here to spear each tail and set it into the salad. A thin trussing needle or a bamboo skewer does the same job.
Holding timeAspic-set shellfish is a high-risk cold dish. Assemble it in the refrigerator, and do not let it stand at room temperature for more than about two hours before serving.

A Little History

This is No. 2630 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium the chef of Delmonico's assembled from three decades of New York service. The heavily cross-referenced style — a dish built entirely from numbered components made elsewhere in the book — reflects a brigade kitchen where aspic, mayonnaise collee and macedoine were standing preparations, not things made from scratch for a single salad. Cold molded work of this kind was the great vehicle of nineteenth-century restaurant display, generally traced back to Carême's ambition to make the buffet architectural; the wooden support hidden under paper is a candid admission of how such centerpieces actually stood up. Crawfish, or écrevisses, carried strong French associations for Ranhofer's clientele, and appear throughout the book in bisques, garnishes and butters rather than as the Louisiana boil the word now suggests to most American readers.