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Cayenne (Remove meat from crabs)
Remove meat from crabs, and chop finely. Add stock, bread crumbs, onion, and parsley, and simmer twenty mincrumbs, onion, and parsley, and simmer twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve, bind with butter and flour cooked together, then add cream and seasonings. Serve with Pulled Bread.
A classic crab bisque built the old way: simmer, sieve, thicken with a white roux, finish with cream. The instructions survive complete, but the quantities that would have stood above them do not, so treat the proportions below as a working reconstruction.
- Working proportionsFor four servings: about 2 cups picked crab meat, 4 cups white stock or fish stock, 1/2 cup soft bread crumbs, a slice of onion, a sprig of parsley, 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, 1 cup cream, salt, white pepper and a few grains of cayenne.
- Pick the crab carefullyGo through the meat with your fingers for shell and cartilage before chopping, so that nothing gritty is worked through later.
- Reserve some meatRubbing everything through a sieve leaves a smooth pur he recipe as written directs, without pieces. If you prefer some texture, hold back a third of the picked meat and stir it in with the cream, off the heat -- a departure from the original.
- "Bind with butter and flour cooked together"That is a white roux: melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook two or three minutes without letting it colour, then whisk the hot soup into it gradually to avoid lumps.
- The cream goes in last, and gentlyOnce the cream is added, keep the soup below a simmer. A hard boil after the cream can break the soup and dulls the crab flavour.
- Cayenne means a few grainsCayenne here is a background seasoning rather than a heat element, a pinch on the tip of a knife. White pepper rather than black keeps the soup pale.
- Pulled breadSoft bread torn from the loaf in rough pieces and dried in the oven until crisp and lightly browned; the book gives no temperature, but a low oven of about 300F answers. Ordinary croutons or a thin toast will stand in.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 cups, serving four as a first course.
Crab bisques of this kind were a common fixture of the soup chapters of American cookbooks, alongside lobster and oyster versions built on the same skeleton: shellfish, stock, a thickening of butter and flour, and cream to finish. The bread crumbs simmered with the crab do double duty as thickener and body, a habit often traced to older English and French shellfish soups in which pounded bread, rather than flour, carried the texture. Sieving everything into a smooth pur e was the prevailing taste in this style of cookery, where a soup's refinement was measured by how completely it had been rubbed through the sieve. Pulled bread -- torn rather than sliced, so the ragged surface crisps -- was a usual companion to cream soups at a formal table.