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Salt (Common crackers finely pounded)
2 common crackers, finely pounded Paprika or cayenne Remove meat from lobster shell and cut in small dice. Cream two tablespoons butter, add liver of lobster (green part) and crackers; scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to mixture. Cook body bones ten minutes in cold water to cover, strain, and add to mixture with lobster dice. Season with salt and paprika. 3 lb. haddock 1 quart cold water 2 slices carrot Bit of bay leaf Sprig of parsley 1 cracker, pounded
This page is a scrambled composite: the body of a lobster bisque has been run together with the ingredient list for a fish stock, and both are missing their headings and most of their quantities. Treat it as a method to read rather than a card to cook from, and fill in the amounts from a current bisque recipe.
- What is actually hereThe instructions belong to a lobster bisque thickened with pounded cracker. The trailing lines (3 lb. haddock, a quart of cold water, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, one cracker) are the opening of a separate fish soup or stock and have no connection to the lobster method above them.
- Missing quantitiesNo lobster weight and no milk measure survive on the page; the only amounts left are two crackers and two tablespoons of butter. Bisques of this type are generally built on a lobster of about two pounds with roughly a quart of milk, but that has to come from a comparable recipe, not from this text, which gives neither.
- Common crackersThe New England common cracker is a dry, hard, barely seasoned round, close to a water biscuit. Pounded fine it acts as the thickener in place of a roux. Plain water crackers, or saltines with unsalted tops, crushed to powder, behave similarly; do not substitute a buttery cracker, which will make the soup greasy.
- The liverThe "green part" is the tomalley, the lobster's hepatopancreas. It contributes much of the flavour here and is creamed with the butter so that it disperses evenly. Advisories exist about accumulated contaminants in tomalley, so some cooks omit it; the soup is milder without it.
- Body bonesThis means the shell and the thin cartilaginous body plates left after picking. Simmered ten minutes in just enough cold water to cover, they give a light shellfish broth. Ten minutes is short by modern habit, which would simmer shells considerably longer for a fuller stock.
- Scalding the milkScalded milk here means heated until it steams and the surface trembles, around 180F, not boiled. The onion is steeped in it and lifted out, an infusion method that predates the widespread use of onion powder or stock cubes.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inCracker-thickened milk soups curdle readily if boiled. Bring the assembled soup only to serving heat and hold it below a simmer.
- YieldBuilt on one lobster and about a quart of milk it would serve roughly four as a first course, though the page gives no quantities to confirm that. Reheat gently; it will thicken further on standing as the cracker swells.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book grouped bisques of this kind with its soups made without stock, since the body comes from the shellfish itself and from a handful of pounded cracker rather than from a stockpot -- useful for households without a standing stock. Cracker as a thickener is a New England habit, associated with the common cracker of Vermont and Massachusetts, and it appears in the region's chowders and milk soups alongside and before flour-and-butter thickening. The instruction to cream the tomalley with butter is worth noticing: the green liver was valued rather than discarded, and the recipe's opening step makes sure none of it is wasted.