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Clam Bisque
2 cups clams, 2 tablespoons chopped onions, bit of bay leaf, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups chicken stock, 1 teaspoon salt, pepper and red pepper to taste, 1 pint hot cream, and 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce. Chop clams, and cook in stock 20 minutes. Melt Crisco, add onions, cook 5 minutes; add flour, strained clam liquor, cook 5 minutes; add seasonings, cream, and serve.
A Crisco-era soup that assumes you know the standard bisque method and fills in only the parts the author thought needed saying. Two things are left implicit: nothing should boil once the cream goes in, and the clams themselves have to be put back.
- The hinge: no boiling after the creamAdd the hot cream off the heat or over the barest flame and serve at once. A pint of cream in a flour-thickened, salty, acidic base will curdle or catch on the bottom if it comes up to a boil.
- What happens to the clamsThe recipe strains the clam liquor into the roux and never says what becomes of the chopped clams. Traditional practice is either to sieve or purée them into the soup, or to return them to the finished bisque at the end. Choose one; do not simply discard 2 cups of clams.
- Twenty minutes of clamsThat length of simmering extracts flavor into the stock but leaves the clam meat firm and chewy. If you want tender pieces in the bowl, hold some chopped clams back and drop them in for the last minute or two.
- CriscoIntroduced as an all-vegetable shortening in 1911 and the reason this book exists. Butter, 3 tablespoons, gives a better result in a cream soup; the quantity is the same either way.
- Measures1 pint hot cream is 2 cups. "2 cups clams" means shucked meats, roughly 1 lb; drained canned clams, with their juice reserved as part of the liquor, will also do.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chile flakes. A pinch is enough alongside the Worcestershire, both of which are there to lift the sweetness of the cream.
- The bay leafPut it in with the clams and stock at the start, and fish it out before straining. "Bit of bay leaf" means a fragment of one dried leaf, not a whole one.
- YieldAbout 6 cups; four generous or six modest servings as a first course.
A Calendar of Dinners was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to sell Crisco, which came on the market in 1911, and its recipes call for the shortening in places a nineteenth-century cook would simply have used butter or salt pork drippings — including, as here, the roux of a cream soup. The word bisque is generally traced to French shellfish soups thickened with pounded shells or rice; by the time American cookbooks of this period took it up, it had come to mean little more than a rich, strained, cream-finished soup, and clam, lobster, oyster and even tomato bisques all appear side by side. Clams were cheap, abundant and heavily canned along the Atlantic coast, which is why a dish built on 2 cups of them and a pint of cream could still read as everyday cooking rather than luxury.