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Crayfish Soup (Take fifty crayfish pull out)
247. Take fifty crayfish, pull out the tails, and then pound the rest in a mortar with the shells and spawn. Have ready the meat and spawn of a lobster, two quarts of good veal and ham broth, and put the pounded crayfish into it, with the crumbs of two French rolls, and half a pint of good cream. Let it have one boil, and then press it through a sieve. Put in the tails of the crayfish, and serve with the crust of French rolls.
This is a crayfish bisque in its older form, thickened with bread rather than roux and pushed through a sieve by hand. The shells carry nearly all the flavour, so the pounding is not optional.
- How much crayfishFifty whole crayfish is roughly 3-4 lb live weight, yielding perhaps 6-8 oz of tail meat. The recipe serves six to eight as a first course.
- SourcingBritain's native white-clawed crayfish is a protected species and may not be taken from the wild. Buy farmed or imported crayfish, or use the invasive signal crayfish where it is legally sold.
- Pound the shells properlyThe whole point of the dish is the shell flavour. A mortar works, but a food processor followed by a fine sieve is faster; either way the debris must be worked hard against the sieve to extract everything, not merely rinsed through.
- Veal and ham brothTwo quarts of unsalted veal stock with a ham hock or bacon bone simmered in it. Season only at the end, as the ham keeps concentrating as the soup reduces.
- French rollsLight white bread rolls, not a modern baguette. Two rolls' worth of crumb, about 3 oz, is the thickener; the crusts are served alongside, as the recipe directs, though it does not say whether they were toasted.
- One boil onlyCream and pounded shellfish will split or catch if held at a rolling boil. Bring it up once, then take it off and sieve.
- LobsterThe meat and spawn (coral) of one cooked lobster; the recipe does not specify a size. The coral gives colour the shells alone will not. When the lobster meat goes in is ambiguous: read literally it joins the broth before sieving, though adding it after, with the crayfish tails, keeps the meat whole.
- The tails go in lastThey are added to the strained soup off the heat and need only a minute or two to warm through. Boiled crayfish tails turn woolly.
- CreamHalf a pint in imperial measure is 10 fl oz (about 9.5 US fl oz); rich cream is presumably meant by 'good cream'. Add it with the broth as directed, or hold half back and stir it in after sieving for a fresher finish.
Crayfish soups appear in British cookery from the seventeenth century onward, when freshwater crayfish were common enough in chalk streams to be gathered in quantity and sold in London markets. The method here \u— pound the shells, simmer them in broth, thicken with bread, sieve, and return the reserved tails — is the classic bisque technique, which in its earliest French sense meant a rich pottage rather than specifically a shellfish purée. The pairing with veal and ham broth is characteristic of nineteenth-century English soup-making, where a neutral, gelatinous base was built first and the flavouring ingredient carried on top of it. The native white-clawed crayfish that this recipe assumes has since declined sharply, largely through crayfish plague and competition from introduced species, and is now legally protected.