No. 782

Crawfish a la Vinaigrette

Ecrevisses a la Vinaigrette

Prepare the crawfish as explained (No. 1009); cook them in a white wine mirepoix (No. 419), and when cold shell them by suppressing the tail carapace without detaching them from the bodies. Dress in a circle on a side dish, pour over a vinaigrette sauce (No. 634) and garnish the center with very green fresh parsley leaves.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so this three-line recipe is really four recipes stacked. Here is what the numbers stand for and where the dish can go wrong.

The cross-referencesNo. 1009 is the preparation of live crawfish, No. 419 is the mirepoix au vin blanc the recipe names, and No. 634 is Ranhofer's vinaigrette sauce. Their contents are not given on this page; a white wine mirepoix of the period would generally be white wine, water, carrot, onion, celery, herbs and salt, and a plain vinaigrette oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and chopped parsley or fine herbs.
The hinge: brief cookingCrawfish need three to five minutes in the simmering wine mirepoix once they turn red, and no more. Longer and the tail meat turns cottony and dry, which is fatal in a dish served cold and undressed by any sauce thicker than vinaigrette.
Cool them in the liquidThe recipe says only "when cold." Let them cool in the mirepoix rather than draining them hot; the tails reabsorb wine and salt and the meat stays moist.
"Suppressing the tail carapace"Twist and peel off the shell segments of the tail while leaving the tail meat attached to the head and body, so each crawfish still reads as a whole animal on the plate. This is presentation, not shortcut — the ring of red heads with pale peeled tails is the point.
Vinaigrette proportionsA common ratio of the period is roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, though No. 634 is not reproduced here and Ranhofer's own proportions are not given. Dress the crawfish shortly before serving; acid left standing on cooked shellfish will tend to firm and dull the meat.
Sourcing and quantityLive crawfish are sold by the pound in spring and early summer, mostly in the Gulf South, and frozen or canned tails are the usual substitute elsewhere. Peeled tails will not hold the shape this dish depends on. Figure 8 to 12 crawfish per person as a first course, more if they are small.
Yield and serviceNo yield is given here. Two to three pounds of live crawfish makes a filled circle on a standard side dish and serves four as an appetizer, with the parsley heaped in the center.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked over three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Cold Side Dishes" chapter catalogues the small savory plates that opened a long service — radishes, olives, oysters on the half shell, sliced cucumbers, and shellfish dressed in vinaigrette. Écrevisses are freshwater crawfish, a staple of French kitchen work of the period, used for garnish, for crawfish butter, and for bisque; American cooks had abundant native species in both the Mississippi basin and northern streams. Cooking them in a white wine mirepoix rather than plain salted water is the classic French treatment, and serving them cold under vinaigrette with the tails peeled but attached belongs to a nineteenth-century table aesthetic in which a dish was expected to look like an arrangement, not a heap. The instruction to garnish with "very green fresh parsley leaves" is characteristic Ranhofer: the color contrast with the scarlet shells was as much of the recipe as the sauce.