No. 702

Prawns, Crawfish, Crabs or Lobsters with Raw Fine Herbs Garnishing

Garniture de Crevettes, Ecrevisses, Crabes ou Homards aux Fines Herbes Crues

After the prawns are cooked, refresh and shell them; leave them whole and saute them in butter, seasoning with salt, pepper, and raw fine herbs, also the juice of a lemon. Crawfish tails may be left whole. For crabs, take out the largest piece, from the crab, and for the lobsters cut them in escalops or slices, three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness; finish them the same as for the above.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A garnish rather than a dish: cooked shellfish warmed briefly in butter with lemon and raw herbs, meant to crown a fish course or fill a border. The whole point is speed in the pan.

The hinge: barely heat itEverything here is already cooked. Only a brief turn in foaming butter is needed to warm the shellfish through and coat it. Longer and prawns and lobster turn fibrous and weep water into the butter.
"Raw fine herbs"Fines herbes is usually taken as parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, finely chopped. Raw appears to signal that they go in at the last moment rather than being sweated first, so they keep their colour and perfume.
"Refresh"Plunge the cooked shellfish into cold water to stop the cooking, then drain and dry well. Wet shellfish will steam rather than glaze in the butter.
Crawfish tailsFreshwater crawfish yield only a small scrap of tail meat; the instruction to leave them whole simply means do not split or slice them. Devein before saucing if the mud vein is dark.
"The largest piece from the crab"This is the body lump and claw meat picked in the biggest intact pieces you can manage. Backfin lump crab does the job; avoid shredded claw meat, which disintegrates in the pan.
Lobster escalopsThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm. Cut a cooked tail crosswise into medallions of that thickness so each slice shows the ring pattern.
Butter and lemonUse enough butter to film the pan generously; the recipe adds the juice of a lemon as seasoning along with the salt, pepper and herbs.
QuantityThe original gives no amounts because a garnish is scaled to what it garnishes. Figure 2 to 3 ounces of picked shellfish per portion when it accompanies a fish course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system laid out in numbered parts: sauces, forcemeats, garnishings, each keyed by number so a cook could assemble a dish from components. This entry sits in the garnishings section precisely because it was never meant to be served alone; it was a module dropped onto a poached fish, a timbale, or into a border of rice. The phrase fines herbes is often said to have settled by then into its familiar quartet of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, though the usage was less fixed than that suggests, and the specification that they be crues at least marks the herbs as added raw. The precise slicing measurement is characteristic of the book, which assumes a brigade that must produce identical plates in quantity.