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Lobster Bisque (Can lobster cupful breadcrumbs)
1 can lobster 1 cupful breadcrumbs 1 quart milk 1 quart water 1 tablespoonful flour 1/4 cupful Crisco Salt, pepper, red pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste Squares fried bread Thin lemon slices Open a can of lobster of good quality, take out best pieces and cut into small squares without tearing; put them aside. Place remains of lobster in mortar or basin, and pound quite smooth with Crisco. Soak bread in water, adding flour, and seasonings, and put all on fire in soup pot with pounded lobster and Crisco; stir till it boils, and boil for fifteen minutes; then pass it through sieve, add milk and pieces of lobster, and return to the pot till it boils up. Serve with small squares of fried bread, and send thin slices of lemon to table with it. This is an excellent soup, and can of course be made with fresh lobster.
A thrifty bisque built on canned lobster, thickened with bread rather than rice or roux. The method is sound; only the shopping list and a few habits need translating.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadThis book was published to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears where an English cook would have used butter. Butter is the better choice here: 4 tablespoons, pounded into the lobster trimmings as the recipe directs and going into the pot with them.
- The size of a canA can of lobster of this period held only about 6 to 8 oz drained. Modern canned lobster is scarce and expensive; roughly that same weight of cooked fresh or frozen lobster meat keeps the proportion against a quart each of milk and water.
- Pounding without a mortarThe trimmings and fat go into a food processor or blender with the softened butter and pulse to a paste. Reserve the neat squares of claw and tail meat separately, as directed, so they stay whole.
- Breadcrumbs and the soakUse plain dry white crumbs, not seasoned packaged crumbs. They are soaked in the quart of water, which then becomes the cooking liquid; the tablespoon of flour is stirred into that soak so it disperses without lumps.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne, and a pinch is enough. Nutmeg here should register as warmth rather than flavour, no more than a few gratings for the whole pot.
- SievingPush the boiled base through a fine sieve or chinois with a ladle, working the solids hard; a food mill also does it. Anything left in the sieve is bread husk and shell fragment and should be discarded.
- The final heatingOnce the milk and the reserved lobster squares go in, bring it barely to the boil and stop. Held at a rolling boil the milk catches on the pot bottom and the lobster pieces turn firm and stringy.
- Yield and serviceAbout 2 quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. The fried bread squares should be cut small and crisp, made in butter, and passed at the table with the lemon so neither goes soft in the tureen.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to put Crisco, introduced in 1911, into American home kitchens, which is why a shortening turns up in a dish that classically depends on butter and cream. The soup itself is older and grander than this version: French bisques of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were thick potages, as often made with pigeon or poultry as with shellfish, bound with pounded meat and bread or rice, with crayfish and other shellfish used alongside or as garnish, and the word is generally traced to Biscay, though that derivation is traditional rather than proven. What makes this particular recipe a period document is the can. Lobster was among the earliest American foods canned commercially, and by the 1880s Maine and Maritime canneries were shipping it inland in quantity, so a housekeeper hundreds of miles from salt water could put a lobster bisque on the table on a Tuesday. Neil's closing line, that it "can of course be made with fresh lobster," quietly reverses the older assumption about which version was the default.