No. 573

Crawfish Butter

Beurre d'Ecrevisses

Have one pound of very red crawfish shells, pound them with two pounds of butter and when they are reduced to a paste, then put it into a saucepan and cook slowly until the butter be thoroughly clarified; strain it through a piece of muslin into a bowl, and as soon as the greatest heat has passed off, beat it up with a spoon till it becomes cold. If needed to be colored a deeper red, add a little orchanet melted in a little butter, or else some vegetal carmine.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A shell butter of the old French kitchen: the flavor and color of crawfish extracted into fat, then set solid. The whole point is heat low enough to melt and clarify without browning, because scorched butter turns the color from coral to brown.

Skip the orchanetOrchanet is alkanet root (Alkanna tinctoria), used as a red dye. It contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is not a permitted food coloring today. Leave it out; roasting the shells well before pounding gives a deeper color honestly.
"Very red" shellsRanhofer assumes the shells are left from cooked crawfish. Spread the heads and carapaces on a sheet pan and dry them in a 350F oven for 15 to 20 minutes first; the pigment (astaxanthin) is fat-soluble and comes out far more readily from dried, toasted shells.
PoundingA mortar was the tool; a heavy-duty food processor does it now. Pulse the shells with cold, cubed butter until you have a coarse pink paste. A blender will not manage it, and a light processor bowl may crack on the claws.
The ratio and the yieldOne pound of shells to two pounds of butter yields roughly three to three and a half cups of finished butter, since some liquid cooks off and the shell debris is strained out. Halve everything unless you cook in restaurant quantities.
"Until the butter be thoroughly clarified"This means the water has cooked out and the milk solids have separated, leaving the fat clear. Hold it at a bare simmer, 30 to 45 minutes, and do not let it color. If the pan is browning at the edges, the heat is too high and the pigment is being cooked away.
StrainingMuslin means several layers of cheesecloth in a sieve. Press the solids to get everything, but strain while hot and fluid; once it cools, the fat sets in the cloth.
Beating it upRanhofer has you start as soon as the greatest heat has passed off and beat until it is cold. Working the butter while it cools lightens the texture so it can be spread or whisked into sauces; a fully cold block will only break up under the spoon.
Vegetal carmineA red coloring of the period; modern carmine (E120) is made from cochineal insects, not plants. A spoonful of tomato paste or sweet paprika bloomed in a little of the warm butter is the practical way to redden it.
Using and keeping itWhisk it into a bisque or a sauce Nantua off the heat, at the end, or roll it in parchment and freeze. Boiling it back into a sauce dulls both color and flavor. Refrigerated it keeps about a week, frozen several months.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer set this among the compound butters of The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his roughly thirty years at Delmonico's in New York. Shellfish butters were a working necessity in a nineteenth-century professional kitchen: the shells, otherwise waste, carried most of the crustacean's color and much of its aroma, and butter drew out both. The technique belongs to the French tradition of beurres composés, which Carême is commonly credited with helping to codify, and reaches its most familiar form in sauce Nantua, the crawfish sauce generally traced to the town of Nantua in eastern France, where the local freshwater crawfish were once abundant enough to support a trade. The instruction to reinforce the color with orchanet or carmine is a reminder that pre-modern kitchens dyed food freely and without much thought about what the dye was made of.