Home › Bisques › Bisque of Crabs
Bisque of Crabs
Boil 6 hard-shell crabs, in enough water to cover them well, for ten minutes, with 1 tablespoonful salt. Take out with skimmer; when cold pick out the meat, keeping the meat from the claws separate. Chop the remaining meat fine, put in a saucepan with 1 cupful rice, 2 quarts boiling water, 1/2 bay leaf, 2 cloves, 10 whole peppers, and a sliced onion.
Boil one hour. Strain, and return to saucepan; add 1 cupful milk or cream, and the meat from the claws, picked fine. Season with salt and pepper; let all come to a boil, and serve.
A rice-thickened shellfish soup of the older French pattern, with no roux and no tomato. The whole character of it depends on what you do at the straining step.
- Straining is the hingeIf you simply pour the pot through a sieve and discard what stays behind, you throw away the soup. Work the rice and crab through a fine sieve or food mill, or pulse the solids in a blender and then sieve, so the starch and crab pulp go back into the liquid. That pulp is the body of the bisque.
- Crabs and quantitySix hard-shell crabs probably means blue crabs of about 5-6 inches across, which yield very little meat each. Expect roughly 6 to 8 oz of picked meat in total. Fresh or pasteurised crabmeat works: use about two-thirds of it for the body of the soup and reserve the rest, ideally lump or claw meat, to finish.
- Ten minutes is rightLive crabs of that size need only about 10 minutes in hard-boiling salted water. Longer makes the meat stringy and hard to pick from the cartilage.
- Salt the water properlyOne tablespoon in enough water to cover several crabs is very light seasoning by modern standards. Salt the boiling water until it tastes distinctly of the sea, then season the finished soup at the end as directed.
- Use the shellsThe recipe does not say to, but the top shells and body shells carry a good deal of flavour. Cracking them and simmering them with the rice, then straining them out, gives a deeper soup at no cost.
- An hour of boilingKeep it at a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil, and stir the bottom now and then. A cup of rice in two quarts of water will settle and scorch if the heat is high and the pan is thin.
- Finishing the claw meatAdd the reserved claw meat with the milk or cream and bring it only just to the boil. Already-cooked crab held at a boil turns fibrous, and cream at a hard boil will separate.
- YieldSomething under 2 quarts once the hour's boiling has taken its toll, serving six to eight as a first course. If it thickens on standing, loosen it with a little hot milk rather than water.