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Clam and Tomato Bisque
1 quart clams 1½ cups cold water 1/3 cup butter 1/3 flour 1/2 onion 2 cups cream 1 cup stewed and strained tomatoes 1/8 teaspoon soda
This entry gives the proportions only; Farmer expected the reader to know the standard cream-soup method printed a few pages earlier. The quantities are sound, but a few of them need translating before you can work from them.
- The missing methodBuild it as a white sauce soup: chop the onion and cook it gently in the butter, stir in the flour, then add the strained clam liquor and hot cream to make a thin sauce. The tomato goes in last, off the boil, followed by the chopped clams.
- "1/3 flour"Almost certainly a printer's omission for 1/3 cup flour, matching the 1/3 cup butter.
- The soda is the hingeThe soda -- The 1/8 teaspoon of soda was conventionally stirred into the stewed tomato before it met the cream, neutralising enough acid to reduce the risk of curdling. The recipe itself does not say where it goes.
- A quart of clamsThis means shucked clams with their liquor; a quart of shucked meat and liquor weighs nearer two pounds, and counts by the dozen are only rough. Save every drop of liquor; it, not water, carries the flavour.
- Clams need two minutesAdd the chopped clams at the very end and let them heat through only. Anything approaching a simmer of ten minutes or more turns them to rubber.
- The cold waterThe 1½ cups of water is most likely for steaming the clams open or cooking the chopped clams. Strain whatever liquid results through cloth and use it as stock; it forms part of the soup's liquid.
- CreamCream of the period was not standardised by fat content and was often closer to table cream than to modern heavy cream; half-and-half is a reasonable match, and heavy cream will make the bisque richer and thicker.
- YieldAbout five cups, serving four as a first course.
Bisque in nineteenth-century American usage meant a thickened shellfish soup finished with cream, and by Farmer's day the word had drifted well away from its French origins, though what those origins were is disputed: the earliest French bisques were rich potages of birds and game as much as of shellfish, and the often-repeated derivation from pounded crustacean shells is far from settled. New England cookbooks of the period are full of clam soups because clams were cheap and local; tomato was the fashionable addition, the same impulse that produced the long-running Manhattan-versus-New-England chowder argument. The pinch of soda is the tell of the era: before commercial canned tomato was consistently mild, cooks routinely alkalised it to keep milk and cream from curdling, and Farmer prints the trick without comment.