Lobster Bisque
4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk pepper, cayenne and nutmeg 2 tablespoons Madeira Cook lobster, rice and white stock twenty minutes; press through a sieve. Thicken milk with flour and butter cooked together; add seasonings. Combine mixtures and thin with cream to desired consistency. Garnish with lobster coral pressed through a sieve. 2 cups white stock or milk 1 teaspoon chopped parsley blade of mace 2 cups oysters
The text as printed has come apart: the ingredient list and method have been interleaved, and the lobster itself never gets a quantity. Read it as a classic rice-thickened shellfish bisque and supply the missing amounts yourself.
- The stray listSeveral ingredients still sit below the method, and "2 cups oysters" belongs to the oyster bisque that follows rather than to this recipe. The lobster and the rice carry no measures at all; a 1 1/2 to 2 lb cooked lobster and 2 to 3 tablespoons raw rice give the right body for these liquid quantities.
- The oystersTwo cups of oysters looks like stray type from an adjacent recipe rather than part of this one. Nothing in the method accounts for them, and they do not belong in a lobster bisque. If you do add them, they need about two minutes in the hot soup, not the twenty given here.
- White stockAn unsalted light stock of veal knuckle or chicken, simmered without browning. A mild, unseasoned chicken stock is the nearest modern substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily salted, since the purée concentrates it.
- Rice as the thickenerThe rice cooked in the stock with the lobster is what makes this a bisque rather than a cream soup. It must be soft enough to break down completely when pressed through the sieve, so give it the full twenty minutes at a bare simmer.
- Blade of maceA single dried piece of the lacy covering of the nutmeg. Use about 1/4 teaspoon ground mace if blades are unavailable, and note that the recipe also calls for nutmeg, so keep both restrained.
- The coralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, green when raw and coral red when cooked. It must be fully cooked before sieving or it will streak the soup; if your lobster has none, the garnish is simply omitted.
- MadeiraStir it in off the heat at the end. Boiling drives off the aroma that is the point of adding it, and two tablespoons will not survive a hard simmer.
- SievingA food mill or blender followed by a fine sieve does in a minute what the original expects of a wooden spoon. Push through the shell-free lobster and rice only; discard any fragments of shell that survive.
- YieldRoughly 5 cups of finished soup before thinning with cream, enough for four generous or six small servings as a first course.
Bisque is generally traced to the coastal cooking of southwestern France, and the name is often said to come from the Bay of Biscay, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. What defines it in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery is not cream but the shellfish purée thickened with rice cooked to disintegration in stock, a technique that predates the roux-and-milk foundation this version also uses. The doubled thickening here, rice on one side and a butter-flour binding of milk on the other, can be seen in this recipe and others like it, which seem to hedge toward richness and a reliably smooth body. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other trade-published books of its era it offered a full general household repertoire alongside the recipes meant to sell the sponsor's product; a Madeira-finished lobster bisque was the sort of dish that signaled the volume's ambitions.