No. 686

Matelote Mariniere Garnishing

Garniture Matelote Marinière

This garnishing is to be made with thirty-six small quenelles of pike (No. 90) seasoned with cayenne pepper, thirty-six cooked mussels, after removing the small black appendage found attached to them, thirty-six crawfish tails, and six ounces of minced truffles. Mingle all these ingredients in a sautoire, and cover them with a marinière sauce (No. 497), reduced with a part of the mussel broth. Add butter to the sauce just before serving.

← No. 685 Matelote Bourguignotte Garnishing Garnishings No. 687 Matelote Normande Garnishing →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is one of Ranhofer's component recipes — a garnish built to be spooned over a matelote of fish, not a dish eaten on its own. It assumes you already have pike forcemeat, cooked shellfish and a finished marinière sauce on hand.

The hinge: finish off the heatThe butter goes into the marinière sauce at the last moment; the recipe says only "just before serving." Standard practice is to add it off direct heat and swirl rather than stir hard, since a buttered sauce brought back to a simmer is liable to split.
Scale and yieldThirty-six of each element points to restaurant-scale portioning; the recipe gives no yield, but three quenelles, three mussels and three crawfish tails apiece would come to twelve servings. For a quarter of that, use about 1½ oz of truffle, or less.
SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, wide enough that the garnish sits in one layer. Depth here works against you: the quenelles are fragile and should be folded through the sauce, not stirred in a deep pot.
Quenelles of pikeNo. 90 is Ranhofer's pounded pike forcemeat, of the bound type usual for quenelles, poached as small spoon-shaped dumplings in barely trembling water. Whole pike is hard to find; pike-perch (walleye) or any lean white fish makes the same forcemeat. Keep the water below a simmer — boiling shreds them.
The "small black appendage"That is the beard, the byssus threads by which the mussel anchors itself. Pull it away after steaming. Steam the mussels open in white wine, discard any that stay shut, and keep the liquor.
Mussel brothLet the cooking liquor settle and strain it through a cloth before reducing it into the sauce — the last of it carries sand. Reduce it well; it is salty enough that the sauce needs no salt until the end.
Crawfish tailsCook live crawfish briefly in court-bouillon, then shell. Frozen cooked tails work, but rinse and warm them only in the sauce, since they are already cooked and go cottony with a second boil.
TrufflesSix ounces of fresh black truffle is an extravagance on the scale of the original Delmonico kitchen. Preserved truffle peelings, with their juice added to the sauce, give a closer result than truffle oil, which reads as synthetic against a delicate wine sauce.

A Little History

A matelote is a sailor's dish — from matelot, a seaman — a stew of freshwater fish in wine, and by the nineteenth century French kitchens recognized several regional dressings for it, variously associated with Burgundy, Normandy and the marinière style. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working system, which is why this page reads as a parts list rather than a recipe: garnish No. 686 is meant to be called up by number from whichever fish entrée requires it. The combination of river fish quenelles, sea mussels and crawfish in one sauce is characteristic of the period's grand cuisine, where a garnish was expected to supply as much labor and cost as the main item it covered.