Salt Cayenne
Remove meat from crabs, and chop finely. Add stock, bread crumbs, onion, and parsley, and simmer twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve, bind with butter and flour cooked together, then add cream add seasonings. Serve with Pulled Bread.
A crab bisque in the older English style: meat simmered in stock, sieved, then bound with a butter-and-flour roux and finished with cream. The method is complete but the quantities are not, so the proportions below are the working ones for this kind of soup.
- Working proportionsFor four servings, figure on the picked meat of two to three crabs (about 8 oz), 1 quart of light stock, a scant cup of soft bread crumbs, half a small onion and a few sprigs of parsley. Bind with 1 oz butter to 1 oz flour and finish with about half a cup of cream.
- Crab meatFresh-picked white and brown meat together gives the flavour the recipe assumes; brown meat in particular carries the sweetness. Pasteurised tub crab works but is milder, so lean harder on a good shellfish or chicken stock.
- The sieve is the pointRubbing the simmered mixture through a sieve is what turns this from a chowder into a bisque. A blender followed by a fine strainer does the same work faster, but do not skip the straining, or shell fragments and onion fibre will spoil the texture.
- Cook the roux first"Butter and flour cooked together" means a white roux cooked two or three minutes before it goes in, otherwise the soup tastes of raw flour. Whisk it into the hot sieved soup in small pieces and simmer a few minutes to thicken.
- Cream goes in off the boilAdd the cream at the end over low heat and do not let it boil once in; a crab soup held at a rolling boil after enrichment will separate and turn grainy.
- The seasoningsThe heading fragment "Salt Cayenne" suggests salt and cayenne are the seasonings meant. Cayenne rather than black pepper is the usual choice with crab in books of this kind; a pinch is enough to lift the sweetness without reading as heat. A spoonful of dry sherry at the finish appears in some comparable soups.
- Pulled breadA standard accompaniment in books of this period: the crumb torn from a fresh loaf in ragged pieces and dried in a slow oven until crisp and pale gold. The recipe gives no temperature or time, so watch it rather than trusting a clock.
Crab soup thickened with bread crumbs and sieved smooth sits in a long line of British shellfish potages, in which bread was a common binder alongside pounded shell and rice in earlier versions. The butter-and-flour liaison and the cream finish reflect the later absorption of French technique into English-language cookery. Cayenne with crab and lobster was a frequent pairing in household books of the period, valued for giving richness a sharp edge without the muddiness of black pepper. Pulled bread was a thrifty and elegant use of a loaf: the crust went one way, the torn crumb was crisped in a cooling oven and sent up in place of toast.