No. 200

Bisque of Crabs, Oriental

Bisque de Crabes a l'Orientale

Prepare and cook the crabs the same as for bisque of crabs (No. 198), have one pound of onions, cut them in halves through the center of the root and stalk, remove from each side of the halved onion, and on the bias, one quarter of an inch of the root and stalk; mince this up very fine, blanch, then drain and fry the pieces in butter, moistening them with one part of cream. Pound well the crabs to reduce them to a paste and add six quarts of oatmeal previously cooked for thirty minutes in one quart of water. Add the onions, and when all is well mingled together, increase the quantity of bisque with the decanted crab juice and more broth, if the puree be too thick; strain through a sieve or tammy, return it to the fire, and heat it without boiling, and just when ready to serve, stir in a quarter of a pound of fresh butter. Pour the soup into a very hot soup tureen and add a garnishing of crescent shaped quenelles, made of sweet potatoes (No. 317).

← No. 199 Bisque of Crabs a la Stevens Soups & Broths No. 201 Bisque of Crawfish →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already knows the cross-referenced numbers, so this reads as a variation rather than a standalone recipe. The essentials are a crab purée thickened with cooked oatmeal, finished off the heat with butter.

The cross-referencesNo. 198 supplies the actual crab cookery, and the cooking liquid must be reserved and decanted, since this page calls for "decanted crab juice". No. 317 is the reference for the quenelles, here made with sweet potato and formed into crescents. Without those two numbers this page is an outline, not a recipe.
The oatmeal quantity is wrong as printedSix quarts of oatmeal cooked in one quart of water is not possible, and six quarts of cooked porridge would swamp any quantity of crab. Read it as a small measure of raw oats cooked to a thin gruel in a quart of water — treat the oatmeal as a liaison, adding it a ladle at a time until the soup coats a spoon.
"One part of cream"Genuinely ambiguous. In context it means enough cream to moisten the onions as they cook rather than fry — a few tablespoons, not a proportion of the finished soup.
The onion trimmingHe is after only the quarter-inch root and stalk ends, cut on the bias, minced fine and blanched before frying. A pound of onions yields very little of this trim, so save the rest.
Never let it boilThe hinge of the dish. Once the crab purée and oatmeal are in, boiling curdles the cream, dulls the crab and can make the oatmeal gluey. Bring it to a bare steam, and add the final quarter pound of butter off the heat, swirling rather than stirring hard.
TammyA tammy cloth is a fine worsted straining cloth, worked by twisting the ends in opposite directions to force the purée through. A fine chinois with a ladle, or a blender followed by a fine sieve, does the same job.
Pounding the crabsPounded to a paste in a mortar, then strained: the recipe's sieve-or-tammy step is not optional, since whatever shell goes into the mortar has to come out again.
Yield and serviceService -- The tureen must be genuinely hot, as the recipe specifies, since the soup is served below boiling and chills fast.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of thirty-odd years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a run of bisques — crab, crab à la Stevens, crawfish — that shows how completely the word had shifted. In seventeenth-century France a bisque was a pigeon or game-bird potage; by Ranhofer's day it meant a shellfish soup thickened with the pounded bodies and shells, usually bound with rice or bread. What is unusual here is the binding agent: oatmeal rather than rice, and sweet potato quenelles as the garnish, which is presumably what earned the dish the label à l'Orientale. Quite what the label was meant to signal here is unclear, and it may tell you more about the period's appetite for exotic-sounding names than about any actual source.