Clam Bisque
1 quart clams, with their juice; 1 pint water; 1 quart milk; 1/2 small onion; 1 tablespoon butter; 1 tablespoon flour; 1/2 saltspoon white pepper; salt as needed.
Pick over the clams and chop very fine. Put them in the cold water, heat rather quickly; add the onion, also chopped fine, and boiled gently until all the goodness is extracted from the clams. Let the clam juice settle, pour it off from the sediment, bring it to a boil, and skim. Strain the liquor from the cooked clams through a fine strainer or cheesecloth, and add to the skimmed pieces. Heat the milk, thicken it with the flour and butter rubbed smoothly together; add it to the hot clam juice; add the seasoning, boil until it thickens, and serve very hot.
A late-Victorian clam soup built on two liquids -- the clams' own juice, clarified and skimmed, and a milk thickened with butter and flour. The whole point is the clarification; skip it and the bisque turns grey and gritty.
- The hinge: settle and skimClam liquor carries sand. Let it stand undisturbed, then pour off the clear liquid and discard the last spoonfuls with the grit, and skim the scum once it boils. Everything else in the recipe is straightforward; this step decides whether the soup is pleasant to eat.
- A quart of clamsThat is shucked clams with their liquor, on the order of 2 lb; depending on size, perhaps four to six dozen littlenecks or cherrystones, or three 10 oz cans of whole clams with their juice if you are not shucking. Chop them fine before they go into the cold water, as directed; large pieces toughen before they give up flavour.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon of white pepper is an eighth of a teaspoon -- less than it looks like on the page, but white pepper is assertive in a milk soup.
- Cooking time for the clamsThe instruction to boil "until all the goodness is extracted" is open-ended; 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer is enough to make a clam broth. The chopped meats will be firm rather than tender by then; the recipe strains the liquor off them, and the liquor is what carries the dish.
- The thickeningOne tablespoon each of butter and flour rubbed to a paste is a light beurre manie for a quart of milk plus the pint of water and the clam juice -- deliberately thin, a bisque rather than a chowder. Whisk it into the hot milk in small pieces so it does not lump, and give it a few minutes of gentle boiling to lose the raw flour taste.
- CurdlingClam liquor is salty enough that milk can break if it is combined at a fierce boil or held hot for long. The recipe says to boil until it thickens; combine off a hard boil and serve promptly.
- Salt last"Salt as needed" is meant literally. Clams vary enormously in saltiness; taste the finished soup before adding any.
- YieldRoughly 2 quarts, serving six or more as a first course.
Bisque in the nineteenth-century American sense meant a smooth, milk- or cream-bound shellfish soup, a domesticated cousin of the French bisque d'ecrevisses, which was thickened with pounded shells and rice. Compendium cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s often carry a run of them: lobster, oyster, crab, clam. Clam was the cheaper entry, since hard clams were abundant along the northeastern seaboard and by this date were sold canned and shipped inland. The technique here, extracting flavour into water and straining out the meats, recalls the older tradition of clam broth as an invalid's and convalescent's drink, which was sold by the cup at soda fountains and health resorts into the twentieth century.