No. 949

Rissoles of Crawfish a la Beatrice

Rissoles d'Ecrevisses a la Beatrice

Poach some pike forcemeat (No.76) three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness, then cut it up into squares; add to these half as much crawfish cut into the same sized pieces, half the quantity of forcemeat as mushrooms and half the quantity of mushrooms as truffles. Reduce this salpicon down with cream bechamel (No.411) thickened with egg-yolks, cream and fine butter, and with this preparation proceed to make rissoles the same as explained in No. 947. Serve on folded napkins.

← No. 948 Rissoles of Chicken Hot Side Dishes No. 950 Rissoles a la Demidoff →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a cross-referenced entry from a professional kitchen manual: the filling is built here, but the pastry, the forcemeat and the sauce all live at other numbers. Read it as a formula for a salpicon rather than a standalone recipe.

The hinge: the filling must be cold and stiffA rissole is a turnover deep-fried from raw pastry, so a loose filling will burst the seam and flood the fat. Reduce the bound salpicon until a spoon drawn through leaves a clear track, spread it on a tray and chill it solid before shaping.
The proportions as written are ambiguousThe descending series is most plausibly read as forcemeat first, half as much crawfish, then mushrooms and truffles in diminishing amounts. The clause "half the quantity of forcemeat as mushrooms" is garbled in the original English and cannot be taken literally, since it would invert the whole scheme.
Pike forcemeat (No. 76)A fish quenelle forcemeat. Any firm white fish mousseline will stand in. Poach it in a buttered tray, a shade under a quarter-inch thick, in barely trembling water until just set, then cool before dicing.
CrawfishRanhofer assumed live crawfish boiled in court bouillon and picked. A pound of live crawfish yields roughly 2 oz of tail meat, so plan accordingly; frozen cooked tail meat works and needs only draining and dicing. The shells and heads are worth simmering into a butter or stock to enrich the sauce.
Cream béchamel with egg yolksNo. 411 is a béchamel finished with cream; the yolk-and-butter liaison here enriches and tightens it into a binding sauce. Add the yolks off the heat and bring the mixture back only to about 180F. Boiling after the yolks go in will curdle the binding and the salpicon will weep in the fryer.
TrufflesThe book means preserved black truffle, sold in tins and used freely in 1890s hotel cooking. Fresh black truffle is the accurate substitute; if neither is available, leave it out rather than reaching for truffle oil, which will overwhelm the crawfish.
FryingThe rissole method at No. 947 is a filled, sealed round of paste fried in deep fat. Work at 350-360F: hotter and the pastry colors before the center heats, cooler and it drinks oil.
Yield and serviceService -- the recipe gives no quantities, so scale the salpicon to the number of rissoles wanted. "Serve on folded napkins" is the period presentation -- the linen blots residual fat and keeps the pastry from steaming on the platter; a paper-lined dish does the same work.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized as a professional reference: numbered preparations that call on one another, so that a single dish like this one is really the intersection of a forcemeat, a sauce and a pastry method filed elsewhere in the book. The salpicon small dice and bound in a reduced sauce — was the standard filling technique of nineteenth-century French kitchens, used for rissoles, croustades, vol-au-vents and timbales alike, and the descending ratio of fish to shellfish to mushroom to truffle is a typical way of writing it down. The word rissole is generally traced to the Old French for browning or reddening, the same root as rissoler. Crawfish, écrevisses, were a fixture of grand French cooking long before they became emblematic of Louisiana, prized as much for the coral-red shells that colored butters and sauces as for the small amount of meat in the tail. Dish names like "à la Béatrice" were general French menu usage rather than a description; they identified a particular garnish or treatment.