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CRAYFISH SOUP, OR POTAGE BISQUE (delicious)
Take fifty crayfish (or one hundred prawns, if crayfish cannot be obtained). Remove the gut from the centre fin of the tail, or it will make the soup bitter. Shell the fish and keep the tails whole. Pound the shells with four ounces of fresh butter, the crumb of a French roll, and three anchovies, and put them into a stewpan with two quarts of fish stock, four ounces of washed rice, a dessert-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of pepper, and an onion stuck with three cloves. Simmer for two hours. Put the pounded meat, but not the tails, into the soup, simmer again, then press the whole through a sieve. Make the soup hot before serving it, but do not let it boil. Five minutes before it is taken from the fire put in the tails whole. Serve with toasted sippets. A glass of Madeira is an improvement to this soup. Probable cost, crayfish, 2s. per quart. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A classic bisque in its older sense: a shellfish soup thickened with rice and the pounded shells themselves, not with cream. Most of the work is in the pounding and the sieving.
- Devein first, alwaysPulling the dark intestinal thread from the centre tail fin is the instruction that decides whether the soup is worth eating. Left in, it turns the whole pot bitter, and no amount of Madeira will cover it.
- Fifty crayfishThat is roughly 4-5 lb of live crayfish, or about 2 lb of shell-on prawns for the substitute. Whole crayfish are mostly shell; the yield of tail meat from fifty is modest, which is why the shells carry the flavour here.
- Pounding the shellsA mortar was the original tool. A food processor pulses the shells fine enough, and a stick blender in the pot afterwards will finish the job, but the shells must still be pressed through a sieve or the soup is gritty.
- Crumb of a French rollThe soft interior of a small white roll, crusts discarded, about 1 to 1.5 oz. It is a thickener and a binder for the pounded shells, nothing more; any plain white bread will do.
- Rice as the bodyFour ounces of white rice simmered two hours in two quarts of stock breaks down completely and gives the soup its texture. Use a starchy short or medium grain, not parboiled or basmati, which resist collapsing.
- The seasoning is heavyA dessertspoonful of salt is about two teaspoons, and a teaspoon of pepper is a great deal for two quarts. Salt at the end instead, once the stock has reduced and the anchovies have given up their own salt.
- SievingA fine chinois or a drum sieve with a ladle to press against it. Work in batches and discard what will not go through; expect to lose a fair volume of shell debris.
- Do not let it boil at the endReheating hard after sieving splits the butter out of the emulsion and toughens the reserved tails. Bring it to a bare steam, drop the whole tails in for the last five minutes, and serve.
- Sippets and MadeiraSippets are small triangles or cubes of bread toasted or fried in butter, served alongside or floated on top. Add the Madeira off the boil so its aroma survives; a dry or Sercial style suits shellfish better than a sweet one.
- YieldSix to eight persons, as the recipe states; it does not specify a course. The "probable cost, 2s. per quart" is a period market note, not an instruction.
Bisque in nineteenth-century English cookery meant a shellfish soup built on the pounded shells, and the older French usage is generally traced to soups made from pigeon or game as well; the shellfish sense is the one that survived. Freshwater crayfish were common enough in British rivers to be sold by the quart, and the price note reflects a fish-market commodity rather than the luxury they became after the native white-clawed crayfish declined. The rice-and-breadcrumb thickening marks the recipe as belonging to the era before cream-finished bisques took hold: the soup is bound by starch and by butter worked into the shells, and the anchovies supply the savoury depth that a modern cook might get from a longer stock reduction.