Lobster Bisque
2 lb. lobster 2 cups cold water 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 4 cups milk 1½ teaspoons salt Few grains of cayenne Remove meat from lobster shell. Add cold water to body bones and tough end of claws, cut in pieces; bring slowly to boiling-point, and cook twenty minutes. Drain, reserve liquor, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with tail meat of lobster, finely chopped; strain, and add to liquor. Season with salt and cayenne; then add tender claw meat, cut in dice, and body meat. When coral is found in lobster, wash, wipe, force through fine strainer, put in a mortar with butter, work until well blended, then add flour, and stir into soup. If a richer soup is desired, White Stock may be used in place of water.
UTENSILS FOR MAKING CREAM SOUPS. - Page 136.
CREAM SOUP AND CROÛTONS READY FOR SERVING. Page 136. CROÛTONS; IMPERIAL STICKS; MOCK ALMONDS. - Page 145. SOUFFLÉD CRACKERS. - Page 145.
Fannie Farmer's bisque is a cream soup built on a quick shell broth rather than fish stock, and it depends on a whole lobster you have cooked yourself. A few of the assumptions behind it are no longer obvious.
- Start with a cooked lobster"Remove meat from lobster shell" presumes a boiled or steamed lobster, which the book covers elsewhere. A 2 lb hard-shell lobster yields roughly 1/2 lb of picked meat, a cup and a half or so; two 1 1/4 lb lobsters work as well and give more shell for the broth.
- The shell broth is the pointTwenty minutes at a bare simmer with 2 cups cold water extracts plenty from the body bones and claw tips. Bringing it up slowly, as written, keeps it clear; a hard boil clouds it and turns the flavor flat.
- ThickeningCook the 1/4 cup butter and 1/4 cup flour together without browning, then whisk in the strained shell liquor. This is a fairly loose roux for 6 cups of total liquid, so expect a soup that coats a spoon lightly rather than a chowder.
- Scald means about 180FHeat the milk with the chopped tail meat until it steams and shivers at the edges, not to a boil. Boiled milk will catch on the pan bottom and taste of it, and the strained-out tail meat is there only to flavor the milk.
- Coral and the mortarCoral is the roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and coral-red when cooked; it is a natural thickener and colorant. A mortar and pestle blends it into butter smoothly, but the back of a spoon in a small bowl does the same job. The soft green tomalley is not called for here, and many cooks now leave it out entirely because it concentrates contaminants.
- Season at the end1 1/2 teaspoons salt is measured against a shell liquor that carries no salt of its own; taste after the meat goes in. "Few grains of cayenne" is a pinch, less than 1/8 teaspoon, and its purpose is warmth in the background, not heat you can identify.
- Add the claw and body meat lastDiced claw and body meat only needs to warm through, a minute or two off a boil. Lobster held in simmering liquid goes stringy quickly.
- YieldAbout 6 cups, which serves four generously as a first course. The White Stock variation gives a noticeably richer soup and is worth it if you have stock on hand.
"Bisque" in French usage came to mean a thick soup thickened with rice or bread and finished with cream -- early examples were made of crayfish but also of pigeon and other game, and the shellfish sense hardened later. The word is often traced to Biscay, the bay whose crustaceans supplied it — a derivation repeated more confidently than the evidence supports. By the time this book appeared in 1896, American cooking schools taught bisque through the standard cream-soup method: butter and flour cooked together, scalded milk, a flavoring liquid, salt and cayenne. The photographs referenced at the end of the page, showing the utensils for cream soups and the croûtons served alongside, were part of Fannie Farmer's larger project of teaching a repeatable technique rather than a single dish. Lobster itself had shifted status by then: cheap and even faintly disreputable food along the New England coast in the early nineteenth century, it had become a genteel ingredient once canning and rail shipment created a market for it inland.