No. 685

Matelote Bourguignotte Garnishing

Garniture Matelote Bourguignotte

Eighteen crawfish cooked in a court bouillon (No. 38). Eighteen croutons of bread cut into half heart-shape and fried in butter. Eight ounces of small mushroom heads, eight ounces of small onions blanched, then cooked in consomme and glazed. Eight ounces of crawfish tails, a pint and a half of bourguignotte sauce (No. 437). Put into this sauce the mushrooms, small onions, and crawfish tails; dress this garnishing around the remove, and decorate the dish with crawfish and the bread croutons fried in butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component recipe from Ranhofer's Epicurean — a garnish built to circle a large fish course, not a dish served on its own. It assumes you already have two other numbered preparations on hand.

Read "remove" correctlyThe remove is the main course that follows the fish or soup in a formal French service — here almost certainly a whole braised or poached fish. The garnish is arranged around it on the platter, not stirred through it.
The two cross-referencesNo. 38 is Ranhofer's court bouillon, the short simmering liquid used for shellfish; No. 437 bourguignotte is his red-wine sauce in the Burgundy manner. Check both numbered recipes in the book for their actual composition before shopping. Without a red-wine sauce of that type the garnish loses its point entirely — substitute a good reduced red-wine sauce rather than a pale one.
Crawfish cooking timeLive crawfish need only a few minutes in boiling court bouillon; small ones two to three, larger ones a little more. Ranhofer's kitchen used them two ways in one garnish: eighteen whole for decoration, plus eight ounces of picked tails for the sauce. Tail meat yields only about a tenth to an eighth of live weight, so figure on roughly 3 to 4 lb of live crawfish for that eight ounces of tails, on top of the eighteen whole ones.
Small onionsPearl or small pickling onions. Blanch, then simmer in consommé until tender and let the liquid reduce to a syrup that coats them — that reduction is the "glazing." Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save considerable time.
Mushrooms"Small mushroom heads" means button caps, stems trimmed off, cooked whole. Modern cultivated buttons hold their shape well; toss them in butter with a little lemon first so they stay pale before they go into the dark sauce.
CroutonsHalf heart-shaped means cut a heart from a slice of firm white bread and halve it, giving a pointed wedge. Fry in clarified butter so they do not scorch, and set them around the platter at the last moment — in the sauce they go soft within minutes.
Quantities and yieldA pint and a half of sauce with a pound of garnish plus tails is sized for a large platter; the recipe gives no serving number. Halving it is straightforward, but keep the counts of whole crawfish and croutons equal to each other as Ranhofer has them.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the garnishing chapters are essentially a parts catalogue: numbered assemblies a kitchen brigade could call for by name. Matelote is the old French freshwater fisherman's stew, traditionally made from whatever the river gave — carp, eel, pike — cooked in wine with onions and mushrooms; the word is generally traced to matelot, sailor. A matelote à la bourguignonne or bourguignotte is the red-wine version associated with Burgundy, as against the marinière that Ranhofer numbers next. The crawfish are the luxury note: freshwater crayfish were a fixture of nineteenth-century French garnishing, prized as much for the scarlet shell as for the small amount of meat inside, and a ring of them around a platter was a visible statement of expense.