No. 201

Bisque of Crawfish

Bisque d'Ecrevisses

Wash in several waters four dozen crawfish after removing the fins, the same as for bisque Persigny (No. 204); put the crawfish into a saucepan, pouring over half a bottleful of white wine, four ounces of minced onions, the same quantity of finely minced carrots, a few sprigs of parsley, one bay leaf, as much thyme, salt, mignonette, a little red pepper and half a pint of broth; cook all together for ten minutes with the cover on, tossing them several times in the meanwhile, then take them from off the fire and leave them standing for ten minutes longer in their broth; pour them into a colander to drain, and afterward select half of the finest, medium and equal sized ones; remove the tail ends from these, and the shells, and keep the meats aside for the garnishing, also half of the finest, but smallest shells from the head; stuff these with a red pike forcemeat finished with crawfish butter (for this see crawfish butter, No. 573), and with the remainder of the crawfish and the fragments make a bisque, pounding them with their equal quantity of rice; when all is well pounded, moisten with the broth they were cooked in and more plain broth, then strain through a sieve and a tammy. Warm it well without boiling, and incorporate into it when ready to serve, a piece of crawfish butter; pour the soup into the tureen and garnish with the tails and bodies both cut lengthwise in two. Crawfish bisque should be colored slightly more than the shrimp bisque. Use for coloring bisques some orchanet warmed in clarified butter or any other greasy substance, or clear vegetal carmine. Breton makes an excellent coloring for bisques.

← No. 200 Bisque of Crabs, Oriental Soups & Broths No. 202 Bisque of Crawfish a la Bateliere →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's bisque is a three-part operation: a court-bouillon cook, a stuffed-shell garnish, and a rice-thickened purée of the shells and trimmings. Read it through before starting, and stage the components separately.

"Removing the fins"This is deveining. Pinch and twist the centre tail fin on a live or freshly killed crawfish and draw out the intestinal tract before cooking, otherwise the purée turns bitter and gritty.
Quantities in modern termsFour dozen whole crawfish is roughly 3-5 lb depending on their size, and will yield only a few ounces of tail meat, which is why the shells do the work here. Half a bottle of white wine is about 12 fl oz, and half a pint of broth is 1 cup if Ranhofer's pint is the US 16 oz; four ounces each of onion and carrot is roughly one medium onion and one large carrot.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked white or black peppercorns, not a vinegar sauce. The nineteenth-century kitchen used the term for the crushed pepper itself.
The cooking time is correctTen minutes covered with tossing, then ten minutes off the heat in the broth, is right for whole crawfish and no longer. The residual steeping finishes them; a full simmer past that point makes the tails cottony.
Pounding with riceThe rice is the thickener. The recipe does not say so here, but classical practice was to simmer the rice in broth until soft before pounding it in a mortar with the shells and heads. A food processor or a heavy blender does the pounding faster, but the shell fragments must then go through a fine chinois and a cloth, which is what "a sieve and a tammy" means. Skipping the cloth leaves shell grit in the soup.
Red pike forcemeatA pounded fish forcemeat; pike is hard to buy, and pike-perch, whiting, cod or haddock made into a panada-bound mousseline behaves the same way. It goes into the reserved head shells and needs only a few minutes of gentle poaching or oven heat to set.
Never let it boil"Warm it well without boiling" is the hinge. The crawfish butter is whisked in off the boil at the last moment; take the pot above a bare simmer and the butter splits and the shellfish proteins in the purée go grainy.
Skip the colouringOrchanet is alkanet root, once steeped in warm fat to give a red tint. It is no longer used in food: it carries pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is not a permitted colouring. A well-made crawfish butter, or a little paprika bloomed in that butter, gives the colour the recipe is after.
YieldPerhaps six servings as a first course, though Ranhofer gives no yield. The tails and split stuffed heads are the garnish and go into the tureen at the end, not into the purée.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter is essentially the classical French repertoire transplanted whole. Bisque in this period still meant what it means here: a shellfish soup thickened by pounding the shells with rice and forcing the result through cloth, a technique that predates the roux-and-cream versions common later. The name is generally traced either to the Bay of Biscay or to the notion of something twice-cooked, both traditional explanations rather than documented ones. Crawfish gave French cooks their model bisque, and Ranhofer offers several variants in a row - Persigny, à la Batelière, and this plain version - each keyed to the crawfish butter of No. 573, the coloured, flavoured fat rendered from the pounded shells that carries most of the soup's aroma.