Chile Bisque
4 sweet chile peppers 1/2 cup boiled rice Tabasco and salt 1 egg 1/4 cup cream 1 pint hot milk Remove the seeds and veins from the peppers; boil and press the pulp through a colander. To this add a cup of boiled rice, mashed smooth. Season highly with tabasco and salt. Beat the egg; add the cream, then the hot milk, and pour all into the bisque.
A thin, smooth pepper soup thickened with rice and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Most of the work is in the straining and in not scrambling the egg at the end.
- The hinge: do not boil after the egg goes inOnce the beaten egg and cream are added, the soup must stay below a simmer or it will curdle into threads. Temper the egg-cream mixture with a ladle of the hot milk first, then combine off the heat and warm gently.
- "Sweet chile peppers"Not chiles in the hot sense; this reads as one of the mild fleshy sorts, a sweet or pimiento pepper. Red bell peppers or jarred pimientos are a reasonable stand-in. The heat is evidently meant to come from the Tabasco.
- The rice quantity contradicts itselfThe ingredient list calls for 1/2 cup boiled rice, the method for a cup. Half a cup gives a soup you can pour; a full cup gives something closer to a pureed potage. Start with the smaller amount and add more if it seems thin.
- Boil, then pressSimmer the seeded peppers in a little water until fully soft, 15-20 minutes, before pushing them through a sieve. A blender does the job faster, but still pass the puree through a strainer afterward: pepper skin will not break down and leaves the bisque gritty.
- "Season highly"Period seasoning language, and it means it. Tabasco is a pepper-and-vinegar sauce then as now; add it a few dashes at a time and adjust at the end.
- Cream1/4 cup of what a 1900 kitchen called cream is roughly today's heavy cream or a rich half-and-half. Either works; heavy cream makes it noticeably richer.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half finished, which is four small first-course cups rather than four bowls. It was meant to open a meal, not be one.
Bisque in American cookbooks of this period had drifted a long way from the shellfish soups the French word originally described; by 1900 it meant almost any sieved, cream-finished soup, and tomato bisque, corn bisque and pepper bisque all turn up in the same chapters. The rice here does the work that a roux or breadcrumbs would do elsewhere. The sweet pepper and the bottled Tabasco together mark this as a distinctly American entry: Louisiana pepper sauce had been in commercial production since the 1860s, used the way a cook today reaches for cayenne.