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Chicken Bisque
Cover the joints of a fowl with cold water, using a quart for each pound. Add a large minced onion and 3 stalks of finely minced celery. Place a cover on the saucepan, and cook slowly until the flesh will slip from the bones. Put all aside to cool. When cold, skim, remove the bones and meat, and chop fine. While the soup is heating, turn a cupful of milk into another saucepan, to which a pinch of soda has been added. Thicken the milk with a tablespoonful of butter rubbed into a teaspoonful of flour, and add a tablespoonful of minced parsley.
After the soup has boiled for a few minutes, stir into it the chopped chicken and a cupful of soaked cracker crumbs. Boil one minute, then beat in the milk and butter and pour out into the tureen.
A late-Victorian bisque in the older sense: a thickened, creamy soup bound with cracker crumbs rather than a shellfish purée. The method is sound, but the water quantity and the vague "fowl" both need translating.
- The hinge: cool and skim before finishingThe stock must be chilled so the fat sets and can be lifted off cleanly. Skimming a hot pot leaves the bisque greasy, and the milk added later will look broken against a fatty surface.
- "Joints of a fowl"A fowl was a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a modern broiler. Use a whole 4–5 lb chicken cut into pieces, backbone included, or a mix of thighs and drumsticks; expect 1½ to 2½ hours at a bare simmer before the meat slips from the bone.
- A quart of water per poundThat is 4 cups per pound, and with a 4 lb bird it gives a large, thin pot of stock. Note that the pan is covered, so relatively little will boil away. Two to three cups per pound gives a stock with more body if you do not want to reduce it afterward.
- "Cook slowly"Keep it at a shivering simmer rather than a rolling boil; the recipe wants the pan covered. A hard boil clouds the stock.
- The pinch of sodaBaking soda was added to milk to reduce the chance of curdling when it met an acidic soup. A modest pinch is harmless; too much gives a soapy taste. Tempering the milk with a ladle of hot soup before it goes in is an alternative.
- The butter and flourA tablespoon of butter rubbed into a teaspoon of flour is a beurre manié, not a cooked roux — far more fat than flour, so it enriches more than it thickens. The real body comes from the cracker crumbs.
- Soaked cracker crumbsUse plain unsalted crackers or water biscuits, crushed and soaked in a little of the stock or milk until soft. Modern salted saltines will push the seasoning; taste before adding any salt.
- Don't boil after the milk goes inOnce the milk mixture is beaten in, keep the pot below a simmer. Boiling at that stage will curdle it regardless of the soda.
- YieldWith a 4 lb bird the recipe as written makes roughly 3 to 3½ quarts — eight to ten servings. Halve it for a household of four.
In nineteenth-century American and English cookery "bisque" was used broadly for thick, cream-finished soups, and only later narrowed to the lobster and crab versions we now assume; chicken, tomato and clam bisques appear in books of the period. In this recipe the thickening is done by soaked crackers rather than by reduction or a cooked roux, and crumbs of hard biscuit and stale bread were a common household economy. A pinch of soda in the milk turns up in other compilations of the same era, generally as insurance against curdling.