Crab Bisque
2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk 1/2 half cup boiled rice cayenne and blade of mace Boil crabs in water to cover twenty minutes. Remove meat, add rice, and cook in two tablespoons butter five minutes; add onion, cook five minutes, and press all through a sieve. Scald mace in milk. Thicken milk with butter and flour cooked together; add seasonings.
Combine mixtures, reheat, and serve. 2 cups lobster meat 2 cups boiled rice 2 cups white stock tablespoon salt lobster coral
A rice-thickened shellfish bisque of the old New England type, where boiled rice rather than a heavy roux carries the body. The method is sound, but the ingredient quantities for the crab, onion and butter are not stated in the text as printed, so a cook has to supply them.
- Twenty minutes is for whole crabsThat timing applies to hard-shell crabs boiled in the shell, and it is on the long side even for those. Already-cooked or pasteurised crab meat should not be boiled at all -- fold it in at the reheating stage only.
- Blade of maceMace is the dried aril that covers the nutmeg seed; a blade is a single papery orange piece of it. Ground mace can stand in, roughly a scant quarter teaspoon per blade. The original scalds the blade in the milk; lift or strain it out before serving rather than leaving it in the soup.
- The onionNo quantity is given. One small yellow onion, chopped fine, is right for this volume; softened in the butter with the rice it disappears entirely once the mixture goes through the sieve.
- Pressing through a sieveThis is the step that gives the soup its smooth bisque texture. A food mill, or a blender followed by a fine sieve, does the same work faster, though rice worked too hard in a blender can turn pasty.
- Butter and flourTwo tablespoons flour needs two tablespoons butter. Cook them together two or three minutes without colouring before the scalded milk goes in, or the soup tastes of raw flour.
- Do not let it boil at the endOnce the crab and the milk base are combined, reheat gently. A milk soup with shellfish in it curdles and the crab turns stringy at a full boil.
- CayennePeriod recipes mean a few grains, not a teaspoon. Add it at the end, off the heat, and taste; crab is easily overwhelmed.
Bisque in American cookbooks of this era meant a smooth shellfish soup thickened with rice or breadcrumbs and finished with milk or cream, quite distinct from the modern restaurant version built on a shell stock and cream. The rice-and-sieve method here belongs to a technique often associated with the Boston cooking-school tradition: cook a starch with the aromatics, press everything through a sieve, and let the puree do the thickening. Blue crab was cheap and local along the Atlantic coast, and the near-identical lobster version that follows in the book shows how interchangeable the formula was -- whichever shellfish came in that morning went into the same pot.