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CHAPTER XXXVI: Lobster
Lobster Bisque. 2 pounds lobster, 2 cupfuls cold water, 4 cupfuls milk, cupful butter, ¼ cupful flour, 1½ teaspoonfuls salt, Few grains cayenne.
Remove meat from lobster shell.
Add cold water to body bones and tough end of claws, cut in pieces; bring slowly to boiling point, and cook twenty minutes. Drain, reserve liquor, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with tail meat of lobster, finely chopped; strain and add to liquor. Season with salt and cayenne; then add tender claw meat, cut in dice, and body meat. When coral is found in lobster, wash, wipe, force through fine strainer, put in a mortar with butter, work until well blended, then add flour, and stir into soup. If a richer soup is desired, white stock may be used in place of water. FANNIE MERRITT FARMER.
Farmer's bisque is a shell-stock soup thickened with roux rather than a cream purée, and it depends on the lobster shells doing real work. Two of the printed quantities have plainly lost their fractions in typesetting, so read the fat and flour with judgment.
- The butter and flour amounts are corruptThe butter and flour amounts look corrupt -- A full cup each of butter and flour against six cups of liquid would give paste, not soup, and the butter has no number printed against it at all. Other printings of Farmer's lobster bisque give much smaller amounts, on the order of a quarter-cup of butter to a third-cup of flour; that ratio gives a soup that just coats the spoon.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inThis is the hinge. Once the scalded milk and the thickened lobster liquor are combined, hold the pan below a simmer. Boiled milk soup with shellfish in it curdles and the lobster tightens into rubber within a minute or two.
- "Scald" means about 180FMilk is scalded when the surface steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, not when it rolls. Chopped tail meat is infused into it and then strained out, which is why the finished soup tastes of lobster beyond the diced pieces.
- Two pounds of lobsterThat is one lobster of roughly 2 lb, or two 1-lb chicken lobsters, yielding about 1/2 lb of picked meat. Buy them live and cook them yourself, or ask for whole cooked lobster; pre-picked meat leaves you with no shells and therefore no stock.
- The shell stock is short by designTwenty minutes at a bare boil is enough for body bones and claw tips. Longer extraction turns bitter and dulls the sweetness, unlike a long-simmered meat stock.
- Coral, and what it isCoral is the roe of a female lobster, green-black when raw and turning bright red on cooking. Worked to a paste with the butter it thickens and colors the soup. Modern lobsters are often male or immature, so expect to make the bisque without it; the tomalley (soft green liver) can be treated the same way, though many cooks now discard it because it concentrates contaminants.
- Cayenne, not paprika"A few grains" is a scant 1/8 teaspoon. The heat is meant to be felt as warmth at the back of the throat rather than tasted as chile.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four as a first course. It does not reheat well; make it close to the table.
Fannie Merritt Farmer directed the Boston Cooking School and later her own school, and her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) made her name a selling point that household compendia like this one borrowed freely, which is why the attribution appears in capitals at the end. The recipe belongs to the moment when New England lobster had finished its long climb from cheap coastal food and bait to a dish worth a chafing dish and a printed name, a shift in which canning and, increasingly, live shipment by rail all played some part. Farmer's method is French in shape rather than American, a bisque in what is often said to be the older sense of a shellfish soup bound with a white roux and enriched with pounded coral bbisques bisques of pigeon, quail or crayfish were at least as common mdand the mortar work with butter and roe is a direct survival of the classic technique for coloring and thickening in one step.