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Oyster or Clam Bisque
3 dozen clams I onion I carrot I bay leaf 2 sprigs parsley I quart (4 cups) fish stock Salt and pepper Some cream 1 tablespoonful butter 1 tablespoonful flour 1 gill (1/2 cup) Madeira wine Put the clams into a casserole, slice the onion and the carrot, and add them with the bay leaf, parsley, and stock.
Simmer for one and a half hours, then strain; return to the casserole and add the needed salt and pepper. Blend the butter and flour together and add them with enough cream to make two pints. Simmer for five minutes and add the wine when serving.
A stovetop shellfish soup built as an extraction rather than a stew: the clams are cooked long, strained out, and the liquor thickened with cream. Read the method with that in mind and the odd instructions make sense.
- "Casserole" means the potIn this book a casserole is a lidded flameproof vessel used on the burner, not a baked dish. Any 3- to 4-quart heavy saucepan or Dutch oven does the same work.
- The hinge: the clams are flavouring, not the garnishNinety minutes of simmering leaves the clam meat tough and stringy, which is why the recipe strains everything away. If you want clams in the bowl, steam a separate dozen open in a little of the stock for three or four minutes and add them at the end with the wine.
- Oysters cannot take the same treatmentThe title offers oysters as an alternative, but oysters shrink and turn rubbery within minutes. For an oyster version, simmer the vegetables and stock for the hour and a half, then poach the shucked oysters in it for two minutes only.
- QuantitiesThree dozen clams presumably means hardshell clams in the shell -- littlenecks or cherrystones; depending on which, that is somewhere between about 3 and 5 lb. Scrub them well; grit that goes into the pot goes into the finished bisque, and straining through a sieve alone will not catch it. Line the sieve with cloth.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe helpfully notes. Use a dry or medium-dry Madeira such as Sercial or Verdelho; the sweet styles read as sugary in a savoury soup.
- "Enough cream to make two pints"The strained liquid will have reduced well below its original quart, so this means topping up with cream until the total volume is 4 cups. Expect to need 1 to 1 1/2 cups. Cream and flour at that ratio give a thin, pourable bisque rather than a chowder.
- The butter and flourBlended raw, this is a beurre manié. Whisk it in in small pieces off the boil, then hold the pot at a bare simmer for the full five minutes -- less than that and the starch tastes of paste.
- Wine at the end, off the heatAdding Madeira at serving is deliberate: boiling it drives off the aroma that is the point of using it. Season after the wine goes in, since it shifts the balance.
- YieldTwo pints serves four as a first course, or two or three as a main. It does not reheat well once the cream is in; the flour and dairy separate and the shellfish flavour flattens.
Bisque has been used in English since the seventeenth century for a rich soup, at first of meat or fowl as often as of shellfish, and the word is generally traced either to the Bay of Biscay or to the French bisque meaning something twice-cooked -- both explanations are traditional rather than settled. The classical French shellfish bisque was built much as this recipe is: shells and bodies simmered hard for their flavour, strained out, and the liquor bound with cream and enriched with a fortified wine. American cookbooks of the early twentieth century adapted the form to the shellfish at hand, and on the Atlantic coast that meant hardshell clams as readily as oysters, both of them cheap and sold by the dozen. The book's premise -- that a single earthenware pot can carry a dish from stove to table -- belongs to a broader vogue for casserole cookery around 1900, promoted as economical, tidy, and suited to households running with less kitchen help than a generation earlier. The Madeira is the older gesture in the recipe: fortified wine in soup was a mark of a good table long before cream became the defining note of a bisque.