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Red Bisque with Snowballs
Chop fine one pint each of oysters and clams, add to these and their liquor enough hot water to make two quarts.
Add the mashed coral from one lobster, one teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of paprika, a bit of mace, an onion and one tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, cook three minutes, pour into a sauce made of two tablespoons of butter, two of flour, one and one-half cups of hot milk, and one cup of tomato pulp. When boiling, strain and serve, putting a snowball in each plate on its way to the table.
A shellfish bisque built the old way: the soup base and the cream sauce are made separately, then combined and strained. Two details need attention before you start — the coral, and the undefined "snowballs."
- The hinge: combine off a hard boilA cup of tomato pulp going into hot milk will curdle if the pan is at a rolling boil. Have the milk-and-flour sauce smooth and just below a simmer, add the tomato, then pour in the hot shellfish liquor, and bring it up only to the point where it shivers before straining.
- "Snowballs" are not specifiedThe recipe assumes you know. Period soup garnishes called snowballs could be a spoonful of stiffly whipped, unsweetened cream dropped into the plate, or a small poached shape of beaten egg white, or a moulded ball of rice; the recipe as printed gives no ingredient, so choose one and treat it as your own addition.
- Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked. It is not generally sold separately and only hen lobsters carry it, so you get it by buying and cooking a whole lobster. Without it you lose depth of flavour and some of the colour, though the tomato pulp and paprika already do much of the colouring work; a little extra tomato paste and paprika will stand in for the look but not the taste.
- Chopped shellfish, three minutesThree minutes is correct and should not be stretched. Finely chopped oysters and clams firm up almost at once and go rubbery past that — and since the soup is strained anyway, the point of the cooking is to flavor the liquid, not to serve the meat.
- Oyster and clam liquorSave every drop when you shuck or drain; it carries the salinity of the dish. Because of it, hold back on the teaspoon of salt until after the soup is assembled and tasted.
- A bit of maceRoughly an eighth of a teaspoon of ground mace, or a single blade of whole mace fished out at straining. Mace turns up often in cream shellfish soups of this era and reads as slightly old-fashioned now; it contributes much of the soup's perfume, alongside the paprika and Worcestershire.
- The onionThe recipe says only "an onion," and since the soup is strained everything is removed anyway; a small onion peeled and halved is the simplest reading, the halving exposing more surface in three minutes of cooking.
- YieldThe shellfish mixture is two quarts on its own, and the sauce adds about two and a half cups more, so figure something over two and a half quarts -- ten or more first-course servings.
Bisque in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant a strained cream soup of shellfish, thickened with a butter-and-flour sauce and colored, when possible, with lobster coral — a far more literal use of the word than the tomato and squash bisques that later borrowed it. The name is generally traced to the French bisque for a crayfish or lobster soup, though the older etymology is disputed. A recipe that calls for a pint each of oysters and clams plus a whole lobster for its coral alone belongs to a moment when East Coast shellfish were cheap enough to be treated as seasoning, and when household magazines and cookbooks were teaching middle-class households to serve courses in the manner of hotel dining rooms. The garnish floated in at the last second, arriving separately "on its way to the table," is showmanship of that kind: a white mound against a red soup, done for the look of the plate.