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One Onion
Celery. Herbs. Mace. Pound the shell (well cleaned) with the butter until quite fine. Put this into a stewpan to dissolve, then add flour and fry for a few minutes.
Add stock and vegetables, a nice bunch of herbs, and the whiting; boil for half an hour. Add more stock if too thick. Strain and re-heat, adding a little cream.
Serve very hot.
The page has been broken by the book's layout: the heading "One Onion" and the lines "Celery. Herbs. Mace." are the tail of an ingredient list whose top — the shellfish, the butter, flour, stock and whiting — has been left on the previous page. What survives is a complete method for a shellfish-and-whiting bisque, and it can be followed if you supply the proportions yourself.
- The hinge: the shell butterEverything the soup tastes of comes from pounding the cleaned shells with butter until they are fine, then melting that in the pan. Do not skip or shorten it; a food processor followed by a mortar gets you closer than a processor alone, and the butter should be strained off the debris later rather than served with it.
- What the missing ingredients almost certainly areWhat the missing ingredients probably are -- A bisque of this pattern normally means lobster, crayfish or prawn shells, butter and flour in similar quantities for the roux, and a good quantity of fish or veal stock. The fragment itself names only the onion, celery, herbs and mace; it gives no weights or measures at all, so any figures below are the modern cook's guess rather than the book's.
- WhitingA small member of the cod family, mild and soft-fleshed, used here for body and background flavour rather than as something to eat: it goes out with the strainer. Haddock, hake or pollock stand in without complaint; a fish of about 1 lb, gutted and cut up, bones and all, is a reasonable guess for a large pan of soup.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan with a lid, not a casserole dish. Use a 4-quart heavy pan; the flour will catch if the base is thin.
- "Fry for a few minutes"The roux wants to lose its raw-flour taste without browning — three or four minutes over moderate heat, stirring. A dark roux turns the soup muddy and dulls the shellfish.
- Half an hour is for the stock, not the fishThe fish is spent long before thirty minutes are up; the time is there to draw flavour from shell and bone. Boiling much longer than that makes fish stock bitter, so strain promptly rather than letting it sit on the solids.
- Cream at the endThe recipe says only 'a little'. Add it off the boil and bring the soup no further than steaming; a hard boil after the cream is in risks splitting it.
- YieldMade to the proportions above, about 6 servings as a first course.
Bisques of this kind — shell pounded with butter, bound with a roux, extended with a cheap white fish, finished with cream — were a familiar Victorian treatment for lobster and crayfish, and the technique is generally traced to French kitchen practice as it was absorbed into English professional cookery through the nineteenth century. The logic is thrift dressed as luxury: where the meat of the shellfish has gone into a dish of its own, what remains is the carapace, which holds a great deal of flavour and no meat at all. Whiting was among the cheaper fish available in nineteenth-century London markets, and its soft flesh gives body to a soup, which is presumably why it appears here.