Home › Soups › Pimiento Bisque
Pimiento Bisque
1/2 cup rice 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 cups chicken stock 3 pimientoes 1/4 teaspoon tabasco sauce Yolk of 1 egg 3/4 cup cream Wash the rice; cook with the stock until tender; press through a sieve; add the pimientoes, likewise pressed through a sieve, and the seasonings. Bring to a boil; add the egg, beaten with the cream, and serve in bouillon cups with Imperial Sticks.
A smooth, mildly spicy cream soup built on rice as the thickener. The whole thing hangs on the egg-and-cream finish, which must go in off the boil.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the beaten yolk and cream go in, the soup must not return to a boil or the yolk curdles into threads. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the egg-cream mixture with a ladle of hot soup, stir it back in, and warm it through only until it thickens slightly.
- PimientoesThese are jarred or canned sweet red pimiento peppers, already roasted and peeled; three of them is roughly a small jar (4-7 oz), drained. Fresh roasted red peppers, skinned and seeded, substitute directly.
- Sieving, then and nowPressing cooked rice and peppers through a sieve was the usual route to a smooth purée before. A blender does it in thirty seconds; pass the result through a fine strainer afterward if you want the old silkiness.
- RiceUse a plain long- or medium-grain white rice, not parboiled or converted. It should cook to complete softness in the stock, 20-25 minutes, since its starch is doing all the thickening.
- Stock and saltHomemade chicken stock is usually unsalted; commercial broth generally is not. Add the half teaspoon of salt at the end, after tasting, rather than at the start.
- TabascoA quarter teaspoon in three cups is gentle by current standards um, no more. Safer to add it to taste at the finish.
- ConsistencyRice purée keeps thickening as it stands. If the bisque tightens past a pourable cream, thin it with a little more hot stock before the egg goes in.
- Yield and serviceMakes about a quart, which is four to six bouillon cups ", (Imperial Sticks' is a named accompaniment presumably given elsewhere in the same book; a cheese straw or grissini stands in.
Bisque in American cookbooks of this era had already drifted well away from its French sense of a shellfish soup thickened with rice; by 1900 it meant almost any sieved, cream-finished purée, and vegetable bisques of tomato, corn or pepper were widely served. The pimiento itself was a novelty ingredient at the time: canned Spanish sweet peppers are often said to have arrived in the United States in quantity in the 1890s, and commercial pimiento growing and canning in Georgia is generally dated to the 1910s, which is why pimiento turns up so insistently in period cheese spreads, salads and soups. The rice thickener and the egg-yolk-and-cream liaison are both older classical technique, applied here to a new tinned convenience — and the service in bouillon cups with a slim cheese stick marks it as a first course for a formal meal rather than family supper.