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Clam and Tomato Bisque
1 quart clams 2 cups cream 1 1/2 cups cold water 1 cup stewed and strained 1/3 cup butter tomatoes 1/3 flour 1/8 teaspoon soda 1/2 onion Salt Cayenne Pour water over clams, then drain. To water add hard part of clams finely chopped. Heat slowly to boiling-point, cook twenty minutes, then strain. Cook butter with onion five minutes; remove onion, add flour and gradually clam water. Add cream, soft part of clams, and as soon as boiling-point is reached, tomatoes to which soda has been added. Season with salt and cayenne, and serve at once.
A late-Victorian cream soup built on clam liquor rather than stock, with a small amount of tomato folded in at the very end. The whole dish hinges on managing the curdling risk where acid tomato meets hot cream.
- The soda is doing real workThe 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda is stirred into the tomatoes to neutralise their acid so the cream will not break when the two meet. Add it to the tomato purée off the heat, let it finish foaming, then combine — and serve immediately, since the union is stable only briefly.
- Ingredient quantities as printedThe flour is given as "1/3" with no unit; matched against 1/3 cup butter it is meant to be 1/3 cup flour, which makes a standard roux for roughly 3 1/2 cups of liquid. The tomato is 1 cup, stewed and strained — a smooth purée, not chopped tomatoes.
- A quart of clamsThis most likely means a quart of shucked clams with their liquor, roughly 2 lb, rather than a quart measure of clams in the shell. The recipe does not say which clams; the "hard part" is the tough muscle and rim, the "soft part" the belly.
- Twenty minutes is for the hard parts onlyThe long simmer applies to the chopped tough trimmings, which need it to give up their flavour. The soft parts go in near the end and want no more than a minute or two — clams turn to rubber quickly at a full boil.
- Rinse water becomes the stock"Pour water over clams, then drain" is a rinse to release grit; that water is then reused as the cooking liquid. Let it settle and pour it off the sand, or strain it through a coffee filter or damp muslin before use.
- Onion for perfume, not bodyThe half onion is cooked in the butter and removed before the flour goes in, leaving a faint sweetness with no texture. Slice it thick so it lifts out whole.
- YieldRoughly 4 1/2 to 5 cups of finished soup — about four first-course servings, or two as a main. It does not reheat well; the cream and tomato separate on standing.
Bisque in nineteenth-century American cookery generally meant a rich shellfish soup thickened with a roux and finished with cream, a step removed from the older French sense of a purée bound with the pounded shells themselves. The Boston cooking-school books of the late nineteenth century helped fix the style, and tomato with a pinch of soda as insurance against curdling appears in that tradition. Clams were cheap and abundant along the northeastern shore, and often sold already shucked by the quart, which is one reason they recur in the soup chapters of general cookbooks of the period.