No. 453

Crawfish Sauce

Sauce aux Ecrevisses

Fry in two ounces of butter, one ounce of carrots, one ounce of celery root, one ounce of onions, and one ounce of shallot, a few parsley leaves, thyme, one bay leaf, and one clove of garlic. Moisten with half a bottleful of white wine, and let the whole cook for ten minutes, adding to it twenty-four well washed crawfish, a little salt and mignonette. Cook all together for five minutes, while tossing them up frequently, then take out the crawfish and let the stock settle; pour off gently the top, straining it through a very fine sieve; then reduce it to half and add a pint of veloute sauce (No. 415) and half a pint of white wine, and reduce it once more. Shell the crawfish, take the meat from the tails and lay them on one side; pound the remainder with five ounces of butter, heat it, and then pass it through a sieve into a bowl filled with ice water; lift up the butter, wipe it, and incorporate this butter into the sauce; color it with orchanet or else vegetable carmine, and strain it through a sieve. Add the crawfish meat cut in small dice to the sauce, and serve at once.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A classic French crayfish sauce built in three stages: an aromatic wine court-bouillon, a reduction with velouté, and a compound crayfish butter mounted in at the end. The butter is the whole point of the dish, so read that step before you start.

The hinge: the crayfish butterPounding the shells, heads and coral with butter and then melting and straining it into ice water is what gives the sauce its flavor and its color. The butter sets on the surface of the ice water and is lifted off clean, leaving grit and shell fragments behind. Whisk it into the sauce off the heat and do not let the sauce boil afterward, or it will break.
Orchanet and carmineOrchanet is alkanet root (Alkanna tinctoria), a red dye no longer used in food; it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is not permitted as a food coloring. Vegetable carmine here means a plant-based red rather than the insect-derived cochineal. Leave the coloring out entirely u2014 a properly made crayfish butter is already pink u2014 or use a little tomato paste or sweet paprika.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked pepper, traditionally a mix of white and black, and often white alone in a pale sauce. The recipe gives no quantity; it is strained out later with the stock.
Half a bottleful of white wineNineteenth-century wine bottles ran close to the modern 750 ml, so about 1 1/2 cups for the court-bouillon, plus another cup added with the velouté.
Vegetable weightsOne ounce each of carrot, celery root, onion and shallot is roughly two to three tablespoons of each once diced -- a small quantity, meant to season rather than to make a mirepoix base.
Velouté (No. 415)A white roux thinned with veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. A pint of a good reduced chicken velouté stands in perfectly well.
Cooking the crayfishTwenty-four crayfish is about 1 1/2 to 2 lb live weight, yielding only a few ounces of tail meat. Five minutes in the simmering wine is right; longer and the tails turn cottony. Buy them live or use whole cooked crayfish, shells included, since you need the shells for the butter.
Yield and servingRoughly a generous pint of finished sauce, enough for six to eight portions. The recipe does not name an accompaniment; sauces of this type were customarily served with poached fish or quenelles. It is served immediately -- it will not hold on the stove.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this sauce is pure Parisian grande cuisine transplanted: sauce aux écrevisses was one of the standard derivatives of velouté in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, and beurre d'écrevisses — crayfish butter pounded from the shells and clarified through ice water — was a staple of the larder in any large brigade. In France the fish in question was the native Astacus astacus, whose populations collapsed after crayfish plague spread through European waters in the 1860s and 1870s, making écrevisses steadily more of a luxury just as this style of cooking reached its height. American kitchens had freshwater crawfish in abundance, particularly in Louisiana, though Ranhofer treats them here strictly as a French ingredient rather than a regional one. The instruction to tint the finished sauce with alkanet is a reminder that in this period color was considered part of a sauce's correctness, and dyestuffs sat on the spice shelf alongside the pepper.