No. 207

Bisque of Lobster a la Cambridge

Bisque de Homard a la Cambridge

Select twelve pounds of small, live lobsters, eight of them in all; remove the claws and cook them apart in boiling, salted water for twenty-five minutes. Cut in slices crosswise the remainder of the lobsters, fry these pieces in butter on a hot fire, adding four tablespoonfuls of flour; when slightly colored, moisten with half a bottleful of white wine and two and a half quarts of broth, half a gill of brandy, salt and pepper. Cook all for fifteen minutes, then remove the meat from the shells, pound it to a paste, and dilute it with its own broth; strain through a sieve, and afterward through a tammy; mix in one quart of bechamel (No. 409); warm up without boiling, and just when ready to serve, thicken the soup with twelve raw egg-yolks diluted in a quart of cream, and when the soup thickens, incorporate into it a quarter of a pound of lobster butter (No. 580). Put the following garnishing into a soup tureen, and pour the soup over. Remove the meat from the boiled lobster claws, cut the red part of it in slices an eighth of an inch thick, and from these punch out rounds three-quarters of an inch in diameter, using a column tube for the purpose; also have small, round quenelles, half an inch in diameter, made from the fillets of a pike or whiting in the shape of round beads.

← No. 206 Bisque of Lobster a la Benoist Soups & Broths No. 208 Bisque of Lobster a la Portland →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's banquet soup, built on the full classical sequence: fry, moisten, pound, strain twice, enrich. Nothing in it is difficult, but the finish is unforgiving and the scale is large.

The hinge: the liaison must not boilTwelve yolks in a quart of cream will thicken the soup at around 175-180F and curdle above 185F. Take the pot off direct heat, temper the yolk-cream with a ladle of hot soup, return it and stir over the lowest possible heat until it coats a spoon. Once the lobster butter goes in, the soup is finished and should be served, not reheated.
The quantity, as written"Twelve pounds of small, live lobsters, eight of them in all" reads as twelve pounds total divided among eight lobsters, so roughly a pound and a half each. With two and a half quarts of broth, a quart of bechamel and a quart of cream, the finished soup runs to five or six quarts and serves twenty to twenty-four as a first course. Halving or quartering it works, but keep the yolk-to-cream ratio.
A gillA gill A a cup. Half a gill of brandy is therefore about a quarter cup (2 fl oz), and half a bottle of white wine is about 12 fl oz.
TammyTammy A tammy cloth is a fine worsted straining cloth; a double layer of cheesecloth or a chinois lined with muslin does the same job. The second straining catches the fibres and fragments of pounded meat that a sieve lets through.
Pounding the bodiesPounding Ranhofer has the meat taken from the shells, pounded to a paste in a mortar, then loosened with its own broth. A food processor does it faster; pulse rather than run it, then push everything through the sieve with a ladle. Tomalley and coral, if included, add flavour and colour.
Claws and timingTwenty-five minutes for claws from lobsters this size is longer than modern practice, which gives claws from a 1.5 lb lobster about 8-10 minutes in salted boiling water. They are being cut into decorative rounds here rather than eaten as a portion, so a little firmness is tolerated, but the longer boil will make them tough.
Cross-referencesCross-references No. 409 is Ranhofer's bechamel; No. 580 is his lobster butter, broadly made by pounding shells and coral with butter, melting it and straining it off. Any standard bechamel and any lobster or shellfish compound butter will substitute.
The garnishThe claw rounds are punched from sliced claw meat with a small plain cutter (his "column tube"). The quenelles are a fine pike or whiting forcemeat piped into pea-sized beads and poached gently in salted water or fish stock until they float; they should be poached separately and added to the tureen, not cooked in the soup.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its bisque section is one of the fullest inventories of the form in English. "Bisque" in French cooking is often said to have covered thick, pounded soups more broadly before narrowing onto shellfish, though the evolution of the term is contested rather than settled. The proliferation of named variants here "a la Cambridge", "a la Benoist", "a la Portland" reflects restaurant practice rather than regional tradition: a house cook distinguished dishes by garnish and finish, and the name attached to a patron, a place or an occasion. The Cambridge version is marked out by its egg-and-cream liaison and the pair of garnishes, claw rounds and fish-forcemeat beads, both of which are decorative work that only a kitchen with a large brigade would bother with.