No. 321

Lobster and Crawfish Soup, Duke Alexis

Potage de Homard et d'Ecrevisses au Duc Alexis

Mince finely some carrots, onions and celery; fry them in butter, and moisten with one quart of white wine and two quarts of broth, adding four peeled tomatoes cut in two and pressed. Put into this stock, eighteen crawfish, let them boil for five minutes, then lift them out, and put in four pounds of live lobsters, selecting the smallest ones procurable, and cook them for half an hour, then drain them, and pick out all their meats, keeping aside only the meat from the claws, and pounding the rest; dilute this with the above stock, adding one quart of thickened fish soup stock (No. 195); strain through a sieve and heat up to boiling point, but do not allow it to boil; thicken it with raw egg-yolks, cream and fine butter, the proportion being two raw egg-yolks, one gill of cream and two ounces of fine butter for each quart of soup. Detach the tails from the bodies of the crawfish; suppress the belly side so as to keep only the thin shells of the bodies, and stuff these with the crawfish meat, chopped up fine and mixed in with an equal quantity of fish forcemeat made with crawfish, butter (No. 573), season well, and poach them in boiling, salted water. Put these stuffed bodies into the soup as garnishing, and if too large cut them in two lengthwise.

← No. 320 Lamb or Veal Sweetbread Soup, German Style Soups & Broths No. 322 Menestrone Milanese Soup →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's banquet soup that assumes a brigade: a vegetable-and-wine stock, a lobster butter-and-meat liaison, and a garnish of individually stuffed crawfish shells. Read it as three separate jobs done in parallel.

The hinge: never let the liaison boilRanhofer's "heat up to boiling point, but do not allow it to boil" comes just before the thickening, and the same restraint applies afterwards: once the egg yolks, cream and butter go in, the soup must stay below a simmer. Yolks begin to set and go grainy somewhere around 180F. Finish it off the heat, whisking, and hold it in a bain-marie.
GillOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. The liaison ratio is therefore two yolks, 1/2 cup cream and 2 oz butter per quart of finished soup — measure the strained soup before you make it up.
Lobster cooking timeHalf an hour is long by present practice, even allowing that the meat is then pounded. Small hard-shell lobsters of 1 to 1 1/4 lb are done in 10 to 12 minutes in the simmering stock, and since the meat is pounded and diluted with the stock anyway, little is lost by pulling them early.
Crawfish"Ecrevisses" are freshwater crayfish. Eighteen live ones, 5 minutes in the stock, is right — they are cooked the moment the tails curl. Louisiana crawfish are the practical American substitute; a pound and a half of live ones will give you eighteen usable bodies with breakage allowance.
The cross-referenced recipesNo. 195 is the thickened fish soup stock Ranhofer cross-references here; No. 573 is the butter called for in the crawfish forcemeat. Look both up in the book rather than assuming their make-up. Failing that, a fish velouté will stand in for the first, and for the second a shellfish butter made by pounding shells with softened butter, warming gently and passing through a fine sieve.
Straining"Strain through a sieve" means a chinois or tamis, and it is worth passing the soup again through fine cloth. Fragments left from the pounding are the usual reason a soup of this type feels sandy.
The garnish is optional labourCleaning eighteen crawfish bodies down to the thin upper shell, stuffing them with a forcemeat and poaching them is perhaps an hour's work. The soup stands perfectly well with the reserved claw meat alone, diced and warmed in the bowls.
YieldThree quarts of liquid plus the fish velouté reduce to something like 3 to 3 1/2 quarts of finished soup — twelve to sixteen restaurant portions. Halve everything for a domestic table.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades across two spells, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working archive, with many dishes named for the people they were served to. The Duke Alexis here is Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, fourth son of Tsar Alexander II, whose 1871-72 tour of the United States was a sustained press event — he was fêted in New York, met Custer and Buffalo Bill on a Nebraska buffalo hunt, and was the object of several elaborate entertainments. Attaching a royal name to a dish was a common way a nineteenth-century chef recorded such an occasion, and the composition matches the flattery: white wine, tomatoes, live lobster, crawfish bodies stuffed one by one, and an egg-and-cream liaison of the kind that separates a bisque from a plain shellfish soup. The technique of pounding shellfish to extract colour and flavour and then binding with yolks is older than the occasion, and belongs to the French bisque tradition, though the early history of the word and the dish is less tidy than it looks — seventeenth-century "bisque" was often a poultry preparation, and the crayfish version is later.