No. 205

Bisque of Lobster

Bisque de Homard

Plunge into boiling, salted water, twelve pounds of small, live, well washed lobsters; cook them for twenty-five minutes, then drain; break their shells, and extract all the meat. Pound the lobster meat with its equal quantity of boiled rice; season with salt and red pepper, then dilute it with fat broth or lean, should the bisque be desired lean, strain through a sieve, and again through a tammy. Heat it up without allowing it to boil, add a pint of bechamel (No. 409), and half a pound of lobster butter (No. 580); stir well the bisque until the butter is thoroughly melted. Color a lobster bisque a deeper red than the crawfish. Crusts of brioche, a quarter of an inch square, and dried in the oven may be served at the same time.

← No. 204 Bisque of Crawfish a la Persigny Soups & Broths No. 206 Bisque of Lobster a la Benoist →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a restaurant brigade with a copper batterie and a boy to work the sieve. The method survives intact at one-sixth the scale, provided you respect the two things it turns on: rice as the only thickener, and no boiling once the butter goes in.

Scale it downTwo lobsters of about 1¼ lb each, with roughly a cup of cooked rice and a quart of stock, gives four to six servings and keeps the proportion Ranhofer intends: lobster meat and rice in equal quantity.
Do not boil it after the finishThe bisque is bound by starch from pounded rice and enriched with a half pound of lobster butter. Bring it above a bare simmer once the butter is in and the emulsion separates into greasy orange pools. Heat it to just steaming and hold it there.
Twenty-five minutes is for the shells, not the meatA 1¼ lb lobster is cooked through in 9 to 11 minutes in boiling salted water; a quarter of an hour beyond that toughens the tail badly. Since the meat here is pounded to a paste the damage is less visible than in a salad, but the flavor suffers. Pull them early and save the shells.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was forced with two people twisting the ends. A blender followed by a chinois or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin does the same work. The sieve step comes first to catch shell fragments; the cloth is for texture.
Lobster butter (No. 580)A compound butter of this period is made by pounding shells and coral with butter and straining the result; No. 580 is not reproduced here, so check it before assuming the method. It is the source of both the color and much of the perfume. Half a pound is not a garnish, it is the finish of the soup.
Béchamel (No. 409)Not reproduced here; nineteenth-century béchamels are a white roux moistened with milk, sometimes enriched with veal and aromatics. A plain milk béchamel works; keep it loose, since the rice has already thickened the base.
"Fat broth or lean"Fat broth means a rich meat stock, generally veal or chicken. Lean means a fish or vegetable stock so the soup can be served on a fast day. Either is a legitimate reading of the recipe.
The colorThe instruction to "color a lobster bisque a deeper red than the crawfish" points to the coral and lobster butter as the source of color. Resist food coloring; it reads as false against the natural orange.
Brioche crustsQuarter-inch dice of brioche, dried in a low oven until crisp but not browned through. Ranhofer gives no temperature or time, so watch them. Serve them alongside rather than floating, so they stay dry.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and the book is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in numbered, cross-referenced form — hence the trail of references to No. 409 and No. 580, which assume you own the whole system. Bisque itself is older than lobster's respectability: the word appears in French cookery well before the nineteenth century, applied to thick potages of game or shellfish, and the rice-thickened, sieved version is the classical form associated with Carême and his successors. The neighboring crawfish bisque (No. 204) is a reminder that in Ranhofer's New York lobster was a rising luxury; the often-repeated claim that a generation earlier it was cheap enough to feed servants and prisoners is more tradition than documented fact.