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Cheese Bisque
Bring a pint of milk containing a pinch of soda to the scalding point. Add to this a cupful of chicken or lamb stock, in which an onion has been boiled, and a cupful of water in which rice has been cooked. Cook until it can be run through a strainer. Put 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and 2 of flour into a good-sized saucepan and cook until thoroughly blended; then pour the white soup into the vessel and stir until it thickens to the consistency of cream. Beat in 1/2 cupful of grated cheese. Have 2 well-beaten eggs in a bowl, and on these slowly pour a cupful of the hot soup, beating constantly to prevent the mixture from curdling. Now return the soup, with the eggs, to that which is on the fire. Beat for a moment, season well with salt and pepper, and serve. This is very good when properly made.
A cream soup thickened three ways at once — roux, rice water and egg yolk — from the era when "bisque" meant any rich, strained, milk-based soup rather than something shellfish. The whole thing turns on the finish.
- The hinge: no boiling after the eggsOnce the beaten eggs go back in, the soup must not return to a simmer or it will scramble into curds. Keep it below about 180F, beat for the moment the recipe allows, and serve at once.
- Temper properlyPour the hot cupful into the eggs in a thin stream while beating, not the reverse. A ladle at a time is safer than a steady pour if you are working alone.
- Why the pinch of sodaBaking soda was often recommended in cookbooks of this period to counter acidity in milk-based soups and reduce the risk of curdling when cheese or stock went in. The recipe says only 'a pinch'; an eighth of a teaspoon is a reasonable reading, and more can give a soapy, faintly metallic taste.
- "Cook until it can be run through a strainer"This appears to mean simmer the milk, stock and rice water together until the mixture is smooth enough to pass through a sieve. The recipe gives no timing. Straining is implied by the wording, and the onion-boiled stock may carry solids.
- Rice waterThe cupful of water rice has cooked in is the starchy pot liquor from boiling rice, not rinse water. If you have none, a cup of thin cooked-rice puree pushed through a sieve does the same job.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is unspecified here; a dry, sharp cheddar or a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan suits the soup. Add it off direct heat and stir until it melts, since cheese boiled in a milk soup goes stringy and weeps fat.
- Roux and volumeThe pint of milk plus two cupfuls comes to about a quart. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour is a light thickening for that volume, so the cheese and the beaten eggs do much of the work of bringing it to cream consistency. Cook the flour and butter a minute or two without colouring.
- YieldAbout a quart — four first-course servings. It does not reheat: the eggs set on a second heating.
In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "bisque" had drifted a long way from the French shellfish puree; it came to mean almost any smooth, strained, enriched soup, and household compilations of the period print tomato and corn bisques alongside ones like this. This one belongs to the family of "white soups" built on a foundation of milk, mild stock and a starchy thickener — a style well suited to stretching a small quantity of stock and a half cupful of cheese into a full course. The reliance on rice cooking water and the pinch of soda both look like period economies, and cooks working with unhomogenised milk of variable freshness had reason to guard against curdling. The closing line — "very good when properly made" — reads as an acknowledgement that the egg finish is easy to get wrong.