No. 662

Demidoff Garnishing

Garniture a la Demidoff

Sixteen pieces of small, flat lobster croquettes (No. 880), sixteen pieces of risolletes of pancakes with forcemeat or hashed fish, sixteen pieces of large drained oysters, rolled in powdered crackers and fried in clarified butter, drained and dredged over with chopped parsley. Dress this garnishing around a remove and serve separately a lean veloute sauce (No. 415) reduced with some of the oyster liquor.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is not a standalone dish but an assembly of three cooked items arranged around a larger centerpiece, with a sauce passed at table. Ranhofer wrote it as shorthand for a kitchen that already had the component recipes in hand, so the work is mostly in deciding what you are garnishing.

What a "remove" isIn the service Ranhofer worked in, the remove was the substantial course that replaced the soup or fish — a braised joint, a whole fish, a poached capon. This garnish is meant to ring that platter, not to be eaten on its own.
The oysters are the hingeLarge oysters, crumbed and fried in clarified butter, need well under two minutes — just until the coating colors. Overcooked they go rubbery, and here they are competing with two richer, softer items.
Cross-referencesNo. 880 is Ranhofer's lobster croquette mixture, No. 415 his velouté. Any firm lobster croquette farce and a good velouté will serve; the recipe numbers only matter if you are working from the whole book.
"Risolletes of pancakes"Thin unsweetened crêpes spread with forcemeat or flaked cooked fish, rolled or folded, then cut into pieces and fried. Ranhofer's spelling wanders; these are small rissoles built on pancake rather than pastry.
"Powdered crackers"Plain soda or water crackers crushed fine — a dry crumb commonly used in kitchens of the period, drier and saltier than modern breadcrumbs. Unsalted cracker crumbs or panko ground fine come closest.
"Lean" veloutéLean (maigre) means made without meat stock — in a seafood garnish like this, fish stock rather than veal or chicken. Reducing it with strained oyster liquor is the point of the sauce; add the liquor before the final seasoning, as it carries its own salt.
Clarified butterNeeded because whole butter's milk solids scorch at frying heat. Ghee works, and holds at temperature better than butter clarified in a home pan.
YieldForty-eight pieces in three sets of sixteen. Scale by ring size, not by appetite, and fry the oysters last so they reach the dining room hot.

A Little History

Garnitures in The Epicurean (1894) are named the way hotel dishes were named in the second half of the nineteenth century: for patrons, royalty, and the very rich, and the Demidoffs qualified on the last two counts. The Russian industrial family, ennobled as princes of San Donato, spent lavishly in Paris and Florence through the mid-1800s. The classical garniture Demidoff recorded in later French repertories is quite different — turned root vegetables, sometimes truffle, around poultry — so Charles Ranhofer's lobster, fish-forcemeat and oyster version is best read as Delmonico's own reading of a fashionable name rather than a fixed formula. That mismatch is itself characteristic of the period: a garnish name signalled prestige and social reference before it signalled a specific set of ingredients, and each grand kitchen felt free to fill it in.