Almond Bisque
2 pts. milk. 1/2 pt. blanched almonds, browned and ground. 1 heaping spoon flour. 1 tablespoon butter.
Cook butter, flour and milk until thick. Add almonds while fresh and warm. Serve with whipped cream on each cup.
A thin, fragrant cream soup that lives or dies on the almonds: they must be freshly toasted and freshly ground, and stirred in at the last moment. The original is written in the telegraphic style Mrs. Wilson used throughout, so a few quantities need pinning down.
- The hinge: grind and add at the endToasted almonds lose aroma quickly once ground, which is why the instruction says to add them "while fresh and warm." Grind them while the sauce thickens and stir them in at the last moment, then serve; held over a burner the soup turns pasty and flat.
- Pints and half-pints2 pints of milk is 4 cups. A half-pint of almonds is a level cup by volume, roughly 5 oz of whole blanched almonds before grinding.
- "1 heaping spoon flour"Ambiguous as written, but paired with a tablespoon of butter it is almost certainly a heaping tablespoon, giving a roux in even proportion. Note that 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour to 4 cups of milk is barely a thickening at all; "cook until thick" means lightly napping, not a chowder. Double both if you want body.
- Blanching and browningTo blanch, cover the almonds with boiling water for a minute and slip off the skins. Brown them in a 350F oven for 8 to 10 minutes, until they smell toasted and are pale gold inside; past that the bisque tastes scorched.
- GrindingA food processor works, but pulse in short bursts. Warm toasted almonds will slide into almond butter if run continuously, and the soup wants a fine meal, not a paste.
- Texture and strainingGround almonds stay slightly gritty and will settle in the cup. Strain through a fine sieve for a smooth bisque, or leave them in for the fuller nut flavor the recipe clearly intends.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified. Half a teaspoon of salt for the full quantity is a reasonable start; nutmeg and a few grains of cayenne were common seasonings for milk soups of the period.
- Cream and yieldThe whipped cream is presumably unsweetened, spooned on at the table. The recipe makes about 5 cups, serving four generously or six in small cups.
Almond soups are far older than this book: medieval and early modern European kitchens leaned on ground almonds and almond milk for fast days, when dairy and meat broth were off the table, and the technique survived into the nineteenth century as a genteel white soup. By the time Mary A. Wilson was writing, the word bisque had loosened considerably in American cookbooks and was applied to almost any smooth, cream-thickened soup, vegetable or nut included. Wilson, who wrote widely for the domestic press around the First World War, favored exactly this kind of short, economical formula built on milk and a spoonful of flour rather than the stock and egg yolks an older French recipe would have demanded; the whipped cream on each cup is the one flourish, and it does the work that a richer base would otherwise have done.