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BISQUE DE HOMARD (Lobster Soup)
Bisques are highly flavoured soups prepared from lobster, prawns, shrimps, crabs, or crayfish. The most favoured is bisque de homard, prepared as follows:--Pound the shell of a lobster (well cleaned) with a quarter of a pound of butter until quite fine. Put this in a stewpan to dissolve, with a quart of fish stock, a carrot, a turnip, an onion, and a bunch of herbs. Boil for half an hour and take out the vegetables. Pound the meat, add it to the stock, and cook for a few minutes, then rub all through a sieve. Pass it through again, adding a little cream. Serve very hot. Price, according to size of lobster and season of year.
A short, old-school bisque that gets its body from pounded shell and meat rather than rice or roux. The whole point is extraction: the flavour lives in the shell, and the butter is the solvent.
- Start with a cooked lobsterThe recipe assumes a boiled lobster whose meat and shell are both to hand. Buy a cooked 1 to 1.5 lb lobster, or boil a live one and reserve the cooking water to strengthen the fish stock.
- Imperial quartCassell's quart is 40 fl oz, or just under 5 US cups. With a quarter pound (1 stick) of butter and one lobster, that yields about four modest first-course servings.
- Pounding the shellA mortar was the original tool; a food processor does it faster, but only for the thinner body and leg shell. Big claw knuckles will damage a blade and never break down anyway, so crack them coarsely with a rolling pin and let them steep in the butter and stock rather than trying to grind them.
- StewpanA heavy saucepan of about 3 quarts. Melt the shell-and-butter paste gently over low heat before the stock goes in; scorching the butter gives a bitter soup.
- Bunch of herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied. The vegetables come out after thirty minutes and are discarded, so leave them in large pieces.
- The sievingThis is the hinge. Two passes through a fine sieve are not optional, because shell fragments are what ruin a bisque. Blend the pounded meat and liquid first, then push through a conical strainer or chinois, and strain a second time through a sieve lined with muslin. Press hard: the pulp holds most of the thickening.
- Cream at the endAdd the cream off the boil and reheat only to steaming. Boiled cream in a shellfish soup can separate and dulls the flavour, and the lobster meat toughens with any further cooking.
- Seasoning the book leaves outAs written the soup is unseasoned. Salt to taste, a pinch of cayenne, and a tablespoon of dry sherry or brandy stirred in at the end are standard for a bisque of this date. Expect a thin, broth-like consistency; if you want it thicker, cook a spoonful of rice with the stock and sieve it along with the rest, which is the classical French method.
- "Price, according to size of lobster"Cassell's gives prices for many of its recipes. It is not an instruction, only the book's habit of telling a cook what she was about to spend.
Bisque in seventeenth-century French cookery meant a rich dish of pigeon or quail; its shift to shellfish soups came later, and the derivation from the Bay of Biscay is traditional rather than documented. What makes this version characteristic of its period is the insistence on the shell: a Victorian kitchen with no stock cubes and no bottled shellfish base treated the carapace as the most valuable part of the animal, pounding it with butter to draw out the pigments and aromatics that water alone will not lift. That butter-and-shell paste is closely related to the lobster butter still made in restaurant kitchens. The text opens by defining the whole family of bisques -- prawn, shrimp, crab, crayfish -- before settling on lobster as the one worth the trouble.