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Lobster Bisque (Tablespoons flour tablespoons)
4 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 head celery, 2 lobsters, 1 small onion, 6 whole white peppers, 4 sprigs parsley, 1 quart milk, white pepper to taste.
Cover lobsters with boiling water, add salt, celery diced, whole peppers, parsley and onion. Cook until lobsters' claws can easily be pulled apart; it will probably take 25 minutes. When cool enough to handle, cut lobsters down back, remove meat from body and claws. Save coral. Put back all tough parts with small claws and shells, and cook for 20 minutes in same liquor. Liquor must be considerably reduced. Dry coral, rub through sieve. Blend Crisco and flour in saucepan over fire, stir in milk, let this come to boil, add 2 cups of strained lobster broth. Bring to boiling point, season with salt and pepper, and stir in sifted coral enough to give liquid bright pink color. Place lobster meat cut in fine pieces in hot tureen, pour hot mixture over and serve hot.
A straightforward two-stage bisque: the lobsters are boiled in a court bouillon, the shells returned to build a concentrated broth, and the whole thickened with a milk-based roux and tinted with sieved coral. Most of what needs updating is the cooking time and the shortening.
- Don't cook the coralThe sieved coral goes in at the end, off a hard boil, and should never be simmered afterward. Held at the boil it curdles into gritty specks and loses the clear pink it is there to provide. Same rule for the finished soup once the milk is in.})
- The lobster timing is longTwenty-five minutes suits a lobster of three pounds or more; for the 1 to 1½ lb lobsters most fishmongers sell, 10-14 minutes in boiling water is generally enough, and the claws will already pull free. Meat cooked the full 25 minutes turns cottony, which matters because it is served barely warmed in the tureen.
- CriscoThis book was written to promote Crisco, then newly on the market. Butter is the better choice in a lobster bisque and does not change the method; 3 tablespoons butter to 4 of flour gives a fairly stiff roux, so add the quart of milk gradually.
- A head of celeryThat means the entire bunch, not a single rib. Diced, it is a large aromatic addition to the boiling liquor and is discarded with the shells; the leafy tops are worth including.
- Whole white peppersWhole white peppercorns, six of them, used to season the boiling liquor without darkening the pale soup. White pepper rather than black is the point, and the same applies to the pepper added at the end.
- Coral is not guaranteedCoral is the unripe roe of a female lobster and is dark green until cooked, when it turns coral red. A male lobster has none. If your lobsters yield no coral, the soup will taste the same but stay ivory rather than pink; a spoonful of tomato purée is the usual workaround, though it is not what the author intended.
- Reduce the shell broth properly"Liquor must be considerably reduced" is the instruction that decides whether the bisque tastes of lobster. Boil the shell liquor down hard during those 20 minutes, then strain and measure out the 2 cups; if you have more, keep reducing.
- SaltA full tablespoon salts the boiling water, not the soup. Season the finished bisque separately and lightly, since the reduced broth already carries salt.
- YieldAbout 6 first-course servings, or 4 as a light main course with bread.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that barely exists now: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use one product. It was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, which is why a French shellfish soup calls for shortening where a European cook would have reached for butter. The bisque itself is older and considerably grander; the name is often said to come from the Bay of Biscay, though that derivation is disputed and a 'twice-cooked' origin has also been proposed, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French practice pounded the shells to extract every bit of flavor and color, thickening with rice or breadcrumbs rather than flour. The tinting with sieved coral is the surviving trace of that older technique, as is the frugal step of returning the small claws and shell to the pot.