No. 746

Lobster, Shrimp or Crawfish, with Mushroom or Truffle Salpicon

(Salpicon de Homard, d'Ecrevisses ou de Crevettes, aux Champignons ou aux Truffes).

Take from the thickest part of the tails, sixteen ounces of cooked lobster meat, or shrimps, or crawfish, and four ounces of mushrooms, both cut in small three-sixteenths of an inch dice; have one pint of bechamel sauce (No. 409), reduced with cream and thickened at the last moment with two ounces of fresh butter.

With Truffles.—Suppress the mushrooms and add two ounces of truffles cut the size and shape as the mushrooms.

← No. 745 Hunter's Salpicon Garnishings No. 747 Montglas Salpicon →

For the Modern Kitchen

A salpicon is a bound dice: uniform cubes of a main ingredient held in just enough thick sauce to make them behave as a filling. Ranhofer gives it as a garnish component, so the recipe assumes you already know where it is going.

The hinge is the sauce thicknessOne pint of béchamel reduced with cream must be thick enough that a spoonful holds its shape on a cold plate. If it is loose, the salpicon will run out of whatever you fill with it. Reduce first, then add the diced solids, so the shellfish is not overcooked during reduction.
Finish the butter off the heatFinish the butter at the last moment -- The two ounces of fresh butter go in at the very end, as Ranhofer directs; swirl it in rather than boiling the sauce hard afterwards, which risks the finish separating. The recipe does not specify taking the pan off the heat.
Three-sixteenths of an inchThat is a scant 5 mm dice, and the precision matters: everything must be the same size so the mixture reads as one texture. Cut the mushrooms and truffle to match the shellfish, not the other way round.
Sixteen ounces of picked meatA pound of cooked tail meat takes several lobsters, or a good deal more than a pound of shell-on shrimp, and far more than that in whole crawfish; yields vary widely by species and size. Ranhofer asks specifically for the thickest part of the tails, which is the part that dices cleanly.
Cook the mushrooms firstRaw button mushrooms diced into the sauce will release water and thin it. Sweat them in butter with a little lemon until the moisture has gone, then cool before dicing and folding in.
TrufflesTwo ounces of fresh black truffle is an expensive proposition now, and was a luxury in 1894 as well, if a more familiar one on a Delmonico's menu. Preserved truffle in its own juice is the practical substitute; add the juice to the bechamel during reduction rather than at the end.
Yield and useAbout a quart of finished salpicon, enough to fill roughly three dozen small bouchées or vol-au-vents, or to line timbales and croustades. Chilled firm overnight it can also be shaped, breaded and fried as croquettes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system set down in print: numbered preparations that cross-reference each other, so a garnish like this one points back to the béchamel at No. 409 and sits in a run of salpicons between Hunter's and Montglas. The word salpicon comes into French cookery from Spanish, where it describes something chopped small, and by the nineteenth century it had hardened into a technical term for diced meat, game, fish or vegetable bound in a reduced sauce and used as a filling. That it appears here under Garnishings rather than as a dish tells you how the restaurant kitchen of the period worked: the salpicon was a component made in quantity rather than a finished plate, ready to go into patty shells, under a fish, inside a timbale. Lobster, shrimp and crawfish are grouped as interchangeable.