Clam Bisque
2 cups chicken stock 1 teaspoon salt pepper and cayenne 2 cups hot cream 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Chop clams, and cook in stock twenty minutes. Melt butter; add onions; cook five minutes; add flour, strained clam liquor; cook five minutes; add seasonings, cream, and serve. 6 crabs 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons onion 1 teaspoon salt
The ingredient list here has come through the scanner scrambled — quantities for the clams are missing entirely, and the last four lines ("6 crabs" and its butter, onion and salt) belong to the recipe that followed. What survives is enough to work from, since the method is a standard cream bisque.
- What the recipe actually needsTwo cups chicken stock, two cups cream, butter, flour and chopped onion (no quantities survive in the text for these three; two tablespoons of each is a reasonable working guess), salt, pepper, cayenne, Worcestershire — and clams, whose quantity is also missing. Figure a quart of shucked clams with their liquor, or about a pint of chopped clams plus a cup of liquor, for four servings.
- The clams are strained outThe clams may be strained out -- The method calls only for the strained clam liquor to go into the finished soup, which reads as though the chopped clams are left behind after the twenty-minute extraction, though the text does not say so outright. If you want clam pieces in the bowl, hold some back and add them off the heat at the end for a minute or two.
- Do not boil after the cream goes inThis is the hinge. Cream plus acidic clam liquor plus Worcestershire will curdle if it boils. Bring the thickened base to a bare simmer, add hot cream, and serve at once.
- Heat the cream first"Hot cream" is deliberate — cold cream dropped into a hot roux base drops the temperature and invites scorching on the return to heat. Scald it in a separate pan.
- Salt lastThe teaspoon of salt may well assume a lightly salted or unsalted homemade stock. Clam liquor is brine and modern boxed stock is salted, so season only after the liquor is in and combined.
- CayenneNo quantity is given. A scant pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon — is enough for background warmth rather than heat.
- YieldTwo cups stock, two cups cream and the clam liquor come to something over four cups of finished soup, enough for four to six as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it carried a full general collection of recipes alongside the chocolate ones. A soups chapter with clam bisque in it is a straightforwardly Boston thing: soft-shell clams were cheap, local and sold shucked by the quart. The word bisque is generally traced to the Bay of Biscay, though the connection is traditional rather than proven; in American cookbooks of this era it commonly meant a shellfish soup finished with cream and thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, as distinct from the milk-and-salt-pork chowder that clams more usually went into. The Worcestershire sauce is a period signature — bottled sauces were the standard shortcut to depth of flavor in a soup built on nothing but stock, cream and shellfish liquor.