Home › Soups › Oyster Bisque à la Reine
Oyster Bisque à la Reine
salt, paprika, cayenne cup cracker crumbs 1 cup finely chopped chicken meat parsley dash nutmeg Cook oysters in their own liquor until edges shrivel. Drain; reserve liquor; chop oysters. Melt butter; add cracker crumbs and milk. Cook five minutes; add seasonings; combine mixtures; strain thoroughly. Add beaten egg and chicken meat. 1 quart shrimps 2 tablespoons onion 3 tablespoons butter 2 cups white stock Bisque of Shrimps, Bretonne 1 tablespoon carrot 2 tablespoons celery 4 cup chopped mushrooms salt and cayenne 1 cup white wine Cook shrimps and vegetables in butter; add seasonings, white stock, and boil five minutes. Press through a sieve. Add wine and serve immediately.
By adding one cup of cream and two tablespoons of butter a much richer and smoother soup may be made.
The page as printed runs two bisques together and has lost several quantities to the scanner, so treat it as a method rather than a formula. Both soups are built the same way: cook the shellfish briefly, thicken with crumbs, sieve, enrich at the end.
- Missing quantitiesThe oyster bisque's ingredient list is incomplete — the amounts of oysters, milk, butter and egg are gone, and the crumb measure reads only "cup cracker crumbs." A workable proportion for this style is a pint of shucked oysters, a quart of milk, a quarter cup of crumbs and one egg, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says. The shrimp bisque's "4 cup chopped mushrooms" is almost certainly 1/4 cup.
- The hinge: do not overcook the oysters"Until edges shrivel" is the whole instruction and it happens in about a minute or two in their own liquor at a bare simmer. Anything longer and the oysters turn to rubber, and since they are chopped and returned to the soup there is no recovering them.
- The beaten eggAdd it off the heat, and temper it first with a ladle of the hot soup before it goes into the pot. Dropped straight into simmering liquid it curdles into threads and the soup that was just strained goes grainy.
- À la reineThe name simply signals the chicken. Poached or leftover roast breast, chopped fine, is what is wanted — it goes in at the end and should not be simmered further.
- White stockAn unroasted chicken or veal stock, pale and lightly seasoned. Low-sodium chicken broth substitutes acceptably; season only after the wine has gone in, since reduction concentrates the salt.
- A quart of shrimpsA volume measure. If the shrimp are shell-on, a quart runs roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, yielding about 3/4 lb peeled, though the book does not say which is meant. Cooking them in the shell with the vegetables and letting the sieve do the separating extracts more flavour, but that is an interpretation of "press through a sieve," not an explicit direction.
- Press through a sieveBoth recipes depend on it. A food mill or a blender followed by a fine chinois gives a smoother result than a wooden spoon and a colander, and "strain thoroughly" in the oyster version means removing every trace of crumb and grit.
- The wineAdded at the end and served immediately, so it stays sharp. If that reads too raw, boil it briefly on its own before adding, though the book clearly intends the fresh note.
- YieldThe shrimp bisque, on the quantities given, makes about four modest soup-course servings; the oyster bisque's yield cannot be worked out, since its quantities are missing. Either way these are first-course portions, not a main dish.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its promotional chocolate chapters it carries a full general repertoire — including a soup section stocked with the French-service dishes then expected at any ambitious American table. Bisque in this period generally meant a shellfish soup thickened not with flour but with pounded crumbs or rice, sieved smooth, and finished with cream. The suffix à la reine is standard nineteenth-century menu shorthand for a dish containing white chicken meat, which is why a soup built on oysters arrives carrying a cup of chopped chicken; Bretonne is more loosely applied, generally attached to preparations involving a base of finely cut aromatic vegetables. Oysters were cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast in 1907.