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Yachting Soup
Boil in a gallon of water an onion stuck with cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs, three or four blades of mace, some pepper and salt; provide two hundred crayfish, reserve about a score, pick the rest from the shells, saving the tails whole, beat the body and shells in a mortar with a pint of peas, either dry or green, but boiled tender, add them to the gallon of boiling water, and after stewing ten or fifteen minutes, or till all the goodness is extracted, strain. Next set it over a slow fire, put in a stale French roll sliced very thin; stew till half wasted; put two ounces of butter in a saucepan, shake in two table-spoonfuls of flour, add an onion, and stir about to keep from burning; put in the tails of the crayfish and a pint of the soup, let all simmer for five minutes, then take out the onion, fry a French roll brown, also the score of reserved fish, and pour all the soup together, serve up in a dish, and lay the roll in the middle, with the crayfish around. Be sure to pick out the bags and the woolly part of the crayfish before you pound them.
A gallon-scale shellfish bisque built on pounded crayfish shells, thickened with pease and stale bread rather than cream. The flavour lives entirely in the pounding and straining, so plan the work around that.
- The hinge: pound, then strain hardAll the flavour comes from crushing the bodies and shells with the peas and extracting them in the boiling stock. Pound in batches in a mortar or pulse in a food processor, then push the liquid through a fine sieve lined with muslin so no shell fragments carry through.
- Clean the crayfish firstThe "bags and the woolly part" are the stomach sac behind the head and the gills. Both are gritty and bitter and must come out before pounding, not after.
- Quantities in modern termsA score is 20, so 20 whole crayfish are held back for garnish and about 180 are shelled. If the gallon and pint here are imperial, the gallon is roughly 20 US cups and the pint of peas roughly 2.5 cups; on US measure they would be 16 cups and 2 cups. Two hundred crayfish might come to something in the region of 12-15 lb live weight, depending entirely on size.
- Buying crayfishWhole live or frozen whole crayfish are what this needs, since the shells and bodies are the stock. Pre-picked tail meat will not give the soup any body or colour. Whole shell-on shrimp or langoustines work on the same principle if crayfish are unavailable.
- Cook the crayfish before pickingThe instruction to "pick the rest from the shells" assumes they have already been boiled. Drop live crayfish into salted boiling water for 3 to 5 minutes until the shells turn red, then shell them; raw tails will not release cleanly.
- Blades of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, dried; a blade is a piece of that covering. Conversions vary, but three or four blades are usually reckoned at somewhere between half a teaspoon and a teaspoon of ground mace. The recipe adds it at the start, with the onion and sweet herbs.
- Stale French rollA dense crusty white roll or a length of day-old baguette. Sliced thin and stewed until the liquid has reduced by half, it dissolves and thickens the soup; fresh soft bread turns pasty.
- The butter-and-flour stepThis is a small roux enriched with tail meat and a pint of the strained soup, then folded back into the whole. Cook the flour a minute or two before adding liquid, and lift out the onion as directed or it will dominate.
- ServingThe fried roll goes in the centre of a wide dish with the reserved whole crayfish arranged around it, soup poured over. Do the frying at the last minute so the bread is still crisp when it reaches the table.
Crayfish soups of this kind were standard in British cookery books from the late eighteenth century onward, when freshwater crayfish were still taken in quantity from English rivers and sold cheaply enough to justify using two hundred of them for one pot. The method — pounding shells with a pulse to thicken, extracting in stock, straining, then rebuilding with a roux — belongs to the same family as the bisques of French cookery, and the pease rather than cream marks it as the older, plainer line. The name suggests a dish thought suitable for a boat or a picnic: substantial, made in a single large quantity, and served with a fried roll standing in the middle instead of a formal garnish.