No. 687

Matelote Normande Garnishing

Garniture Matelote Normande

To be made with eighteen cooked mussels out of their shells, eighteen medium sized blanched oysters, eighteen pieces of milt a la villeroi (No. 698), to be the same size as the oysters; eighteen medium sized cooked mushroom heads, eighteen trussed crawfish cooked in a mirepoix (No. 419), eighteen round crusts one inch in diameter, cut from the crusty part of small rolls, buttered and colored in the oven. Mix in a sautoire with some Normande sauce (No. 509), the mussels, oysters, and mushroom heads, then dress them around a remove, and garnish the outside edge with the croutons, the crawfish, and the milt a la Villeroi (No. 698).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a composed garnish rather than a standalone dish: six precooked elements assembled around a large fish course at the moment of service. Everything is finished in advance, so the work at the stove is warming and coating, not cooking.

Read it as an assembly, not a cookMussels, oysters, mushrooms, crayfish, milt and croutons are all cooked separately beforehand. The sautoire stage is a brief warming through in sauce; anything that cooks a second time here will be spoiled.
The oysters are the hinge"Blanched" means dropped into their own hot liquor only until the edges ruffle and they plump, roughly 30 seconds. They then sit in warm Normande sauce. Any real simmering turns them to rubber and there is no recovering them.
Do not boil the Normande sauceNormande sauce is a fish veloute finished with mushroom and shellfish cooking liquor, cream and egg yolks. Hold it below a simmer, or the egg liaison can break and grain.
MiltSoft roe, the male fish's reproductive gland; carp, shad and herring milt were all used in this period, though the recipe names no species. It is not a supermarket item, though it turns up at some fishmongers and Asian markets; the garnish still reads correctly if it is left out. A la Villeroi means the pieces are coated in thick sauce, chilled until firm, breaded and fried.
Sautoire, remove, mirepoixA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow saute pan. A 'remove' is the releve, the substantial fish or meat course this garnish is dressed around. The mirepoix here (No. 419) is a separate aromatic preparation used as the cooking liquid for the crawfish, not raw dice.
Trussed crawfishTrussing means tucking the tail under and pinning it against the body with the claws or a skewer so the cooked crayfish holds a neat curl on the platter. Freshwater crayfish, cooked 3-4 minutes in the mirepoix, not the larger langoustine.
The croutonsOne-inch rounds cut from the crusty part of small rolls, buttered and coloured in the oven. The book gives no temperature or time: take them just to colour without drying them out. Slightly stale rolls cut more cleanly.
Scale and yieldEighteen of each element, which works out to one piece of each per crouton; the book gives no guest count. The ratio holds at any number, so six of each is a workable home version.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) as a working reference for Delmonico's in New York, which is why this page is a numbered garnish cross-referenced to a sauce, a mirepoix and a milt preparation elsewhere in the book rather than a self-contained recipe. Matelote was originally a boatman's or fisherman's stew, from matelot, sailor; by the late nineteenth century the word had been absorbed into restaurant French as the name of a family of garnishes built on fish and shellfish. The "normande" line, mussels, oysters, mushrooms, crayfish, fried milt and croutons, is essentially the classical sole a la normande garnish, generally traced to Parisian restaurant cooking of the 1830s and attached to Normandy through its seafood rather than through any Norman country dish. Its survival in a New York kitchen sixty years later shows how completely Delmonico's had adopted the Paris repertoire, down to ingredients like soft roe.