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Bisque of Lobster
Remove meat from shell, cut into dice; tough, hard pieces may be put into 1 pint cold water, with the bones, and boiled twenty minutes, adding water as it boils away.
Dry the coral in the oven on a piece of paper.
Boil 1 quart milk; thicken with 1 tablespoonful butter and 2 of flour or corn starch; boil ten minutes, and add the water from the bones after straining. Season with 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 saltspoonful white pepper, 1/4 saltspoonful cayenne. The dried coral should be rubbed through a strainer, and use enough to color the soup a bright pink. Put the lobster dice and green fat into tureen and strain over them the boiling soup. Serve immediately. 1/2 cup of fine cracker crumbs may be used as additional thickening. A satisfactory variation will be found in using 1 pint veal or chicken stock and 1 pint milk, and the addition of force-meat balls made by pounding half the lobster meat to fine paste, adding yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 teaspoonful butter, a little salt and pepper. Heat a raw egg, and use enough to moisten the paste so it can easily be formed into balls of nutmeg size; then simmer them in the soup for five minutes, only long enough to cook the egg.
A late-Victorian bisque built on milk thickened with roux rather than the rice-and-shell purée of French practice. The recipe assumes you have boiled a lobster and are working from the whole animal, shell and all.
- Quantity of lobsterNo weight is given. A 1 1/2 to 2 lb cooked lobster yields something in the region of 1 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat, which suits the 1 quart of milk called for. The recipe gives no yield.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning reads as 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon white pepper, and a scant 1/16 teaspoon cayenne.
- The coralCoral is the roe, and only female lobsters carry it. It is dark greenish-black in the live animal, turning coral-red when cooked. The recipe gives no temperature; dry it in a low oven until crumbly, then press it through a fine sieve. If your lobster is male there will be none, and the soup will be ivory rather than pink.
- Green fatThis is the tomalley, the hepatopancreas. Current public health advice in the US and Canada is to avoid eating it, since it concentrates biotoxins and heavy metals from the water. Leave it out and the bisque loses nothing but a faint richness.
- Shell stockTwenty minutes in a pint of water is short by modern standards for extracting shell flavour, and the yield will be thin. Cracking the shells first and giving them 30 to 40 minutes gives a far better result; strain well, as fine shell splinters are the usual fault.
- Boiling the milk baseTen minutes at a true boil risks scorching milk thickened with flour. Bring it just to a simmer, whisking, and hold it there over low heat for eight to ten minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Do not cook the lobster twiceThe instruction to put the diced meat in the tureen and strain the boiling soup over it is the hinge of the dish. Picked lobster meat is already cooked; any further simmering turns it to rubber.
- Forcemeat ballsIn the variation, the balls are bound with raw egg and simmered five minutes, which is enough to set them. Poach a test ball first: if it disintegrates, the paste needs more egg or a spoonful of cracker crumbs.