Bisque of Crab
4 large crabs 3 pts. white stock 1 cup rice 1 cup cream 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Wash and boil crabs, open them and take out meat. Cut fine and pound in a mortar. Add the washed rice and crabs to the stock and simmer thirty minutes. Rub through a sieve. Bind with butter and flour cooked together; add cream and seasonings, reheat and serve.
A classic rice-thickened shellfish bisque, written for a cook who owned a mortar and a hair sieve. The method still works; only the equipment and the crab supply have changed.
- Four large crabsThe book does not name a species; any large regional crab, boiled whole in the shell, fits. Four large ones yield roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat, and about that much pasteurized lump or claw crabmeat is a fair substitute, though the shells are where much of the flavor lives.
- White stockNot water and not brown stock: a pale, unroasted veal or chicken stock, lightly seasoned. Three pints is 6 cups. Use unsalted stock, since the recipe seasons only at the end and the crab brings its own salt.
- The mortar is a food processorPounding the meat to a paste is what lets it pass a sieve and give the soup body. A processor or blender does it in seconds. Classic French bisque method pounds the shells in as well and strains them out, which deepens the flavor considerably if you have the patience.
- Rice is the thickenerOne cup of raw white rice simmered in the stock breaks down and is then pushed through the sieve; it, not the flour, does most of the work. Use a plain long- or medium-grain white rice, not parboiled or converted, which resists breaking down.
- Thirty minutes, and stirA cup of rice in 6 cups of stock will settle and scorch. Stir every few minutes, and expect the mixture to be thick and porridge-like before it is sieved.
- Rub through a sieveA fine-mesh sieve and a stiff ladle or rubber spatula. Blending first and then straining is faster and gives a smoother result than sieving alone. Thin with additional stock if the purée is too heavy to pour.
- Bind with butter and flourCook the tablespoon each of butter and flour together for a minute or two without coloring, then whisk in a ladle of the hot purée before returning it to the pot. Given how much the rice thickens, this roux is for gloss and stability more than body.
- Cream at the endAdd the cup of cream off a hard boil and reheat gently. Boiling after the cream goes in will curdle the soup and dull the crab flavor.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, or six to eight first-course servings. A little cayenne, a squeeze of lemon, or a spoonful of sherry per bowl at the table is period-appropriate and welcome.
Bisque in American cookbooks often meant this: a shellfish soup thickened with pounded meat and rice, sieved smooth, finished with cream. The rice binding points back to French practice, where bisque d'écrevisses — crayfish — was the prestige version; American cooks substituted whatever the local water gave them, crab on the Chesapeake and Gulf coasts, lobster in New England. The name is generally traced to the Biscay region, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook is worth noting: the single tablespoon of Gold Medal flour is almost incidental to the soup, in which rice was already doing the thickening.