Crayfish Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.- 30 crayfish, 1/4 lb. of butter, 6 anchovies, the crumb of 1 French roll, a little lobster-spawn, seasoning to taste, 2 quarts of medium stock, or fish stock.
AVERAGE COST, 7s.
Shell the crayfish, and put the fish between two plates until they are wanted; pound the shells in a mortar with the but ter and anchovies; when well beaten add a pint of stock, and simmer for of an THE CRAYFISH. hour. Strain it through a hair sieve, put the remainder of the stock to it, with the crumb of the roll; give it one boil, and rub it through a tammy, with the lobster-spawn.
Put in the fish, but do not let the soup boil after it has been rubbed through the tammy. If necessary, add seasoning.
TIME.-1½ hour.
SEASONABLE from January to July.
Cream à la Valois. - INGREDIENTS for 1½ pint mould.-4 sponge-cakes, jam, 1 pint of milk, sugar to taste, the juice of 1/21 lemon, glass of sherry, 1¼ oz. of isinglass.
AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Cut the sponge-cakes into thin slices, place two together with preserve between them, and pour over them a small quantity of sherry mixed, if liked, with a little brandy. Sweeten and flavour the cream with the lemon-juice and sherry; add the isinglass, which should be dissolved in a little water, and beat up the cream well.
Place a little in an oiled mould; arrange CREAM EGGS. the pieces of cake in the cream, then fill the mould with the remainder, let it cool, and turn it out on a dish. By oiling the mould the cream will have a much smoother appearance, and will turn out more easily than when merely dipped in cold water.
SEASONABLE at any time. -
A Victorian shellfish bisque in miniature: the flavour comes almost entirely from pounded shells, and the tails go in only at the end. Two habits of the original kitchen need translating — the pounding and the straining cloth.
- Do not boil after strainingOnce the soup has been passed through the cloth with the spawn and the tails are in, keep it just below a simmer. Boiling curdles the spawn-thickened liquid and turns the crayfish tails tough and woolly within a minute or two.
- A tammy and a hair sieveA tammy was a worsted or muslin cloth through which soup was wrung, usually by two people twisting the ends. A fine conical strainer, or a sieve lined with a double layer of muslin, does the same job; a food mill or blender followed by a sieve gets the shell flavour out faster than a mortar.
- Imperial measuresAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, so 2 quarts is about 2.3 litres or 10 US cups. A quarter pound of butter is 4 oz, roughly 115 g.
- "Simmer for of an hour"The fraction has dropped out of the line; the original figure cannot be recovered from this page. A quarter to half an hour of simmering suits crushed shells, and there is no advantage in pushing the extraction much longer.
- AnchoviesSix Victorian anchovies means six whole salted fish, far saltier than tinned fillets in oil. Two or three fillets, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste, gives the same savoury depth without oversalting the finished soup; season only at the very end, as the recipe advises.
- Lobster-spawnThis is the dark roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral-red on cooking and both thickens and colours the soup. It is rarely sold separately now. The coral from a cooked lobster, or the orange roe found in some crayfish, serves; without it the soup will be paler and thinner.
- The French rollThe crumb of a small white roll is the thickener: roughly an ounce or two of soft interior, no crust. Any plain white bread works; it must be rubbed through with the liquid, not left in lumps.
- Crayfish and yieldThirty crayfish yield very little tail meat, perhaps 4 to 6 oz in total, which is why the shells carry the dish. Buy them live or frozen whole; shells from a previous meal, frozen, work equally well for the base.
Crayfish were a familiar catch in British rivers well into the nineteenth century — the native white-clawed crayfish was found in chalk streams and sold in London markets, and the seasonal note of January to July is consistent with a wild catch rather than a farmed one. The method here is the classic shellfish soup technique of the period: pound the shells with butter, draw the flavour out with stock, then thicken with breadcrumb and coral rather than flour, an approach that anticipates the modern bisque. That the fish themselves are set aside between two plates "until they are wanted" shows where the cook's priorities lay: the shells were the ingredient, the tails a garnish. Native crayfish are now scarce and legally protected in Britain, having been largely displaced by introduced American signal crayfish, so anyone making this today is likely working with a different animal than Mrs Beeton's readers were.