No. 209

Bisque or Puree of Mussels a la Cutting (bisque Ou Puree de Moules a la Cutting

Clean well three gallons of raw mussels, scraping them with a knife; wash them several times in clean waters, and take them out with the hand so as not to disturb the sand settling at the bottom. Put them into a saucepan with minced onions, sprigs of parsley, pepper (no salt), and one pint of water; set the saucepan on the fire, and when they begin to get warm, toss them and return them to the fire; cover the pot, and toss them again frequently, until the mussels open and are well cooked, then take them off, and pick them from the shells, reserving about thirty of the smallest for the garnishing. Strain the juice, and let it rest so as to be able to pour off the top and avoid the sediment at the bottom, pound the mussels with as much pearl barley (half a pound) cooked in water, salt and butter, for three hours; moisten with the mussel gravy and water in case the soup be too thick; season with salt and red pepper, then strain all through a fine sieve or tammy; warm it without letting it boil, and just when ready to serve put in a piece of fresh butter, stirring it well into the soup with a spoon until it be melted. Garnish the soup with the thirty small mussels laid aside, and savarin croutons, a quarter of an inch square and dried in the oven. All lean bisques are made exactly the same as the fat ones, only substituting fish broth for meat, and garnishing with milts, scallops of sauted eel fillets, pike, quenelles with crawfish butter, crawfish tails, and the hearts of oysters. The sieve used for the bisque or puree is a round strainer made so as to fit in the mortar having a flange on the edge to fit the outside of it, the pestle is used to force the substance to be passed through it.

← No. 208 Bisque of Lobster a la Portland Soups & Broths No. 210 Bisque or Puree of Oysters a la Wilson →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is writing for a brigade with a marble mortar and unlimited hands, but the method translates cleanly: this is a shellfish purée thickened with barley, not with cream. Two things carry it — the liquor has to be decanted off its sand, and the finished soup must never boil.

ScaleThree gallons of mussels in the shell is on the order of 18-20 lb, which will yield several pounds of shucked meat and serve a large table as a first course. Quartering the whole thing works without adjustment; keep the thirty garnish mussels proportional.
Never let it boilAfter straining, the soup is only warmed. Boiling a barley-thickened shellfish purée toughens the mussel protein into grit and dulls the flavour, and the butter finish will break. Hold it below a simmer and mount the butter off the heat.
The sandThe instructions to lift mussels out by hand and to decant the liquor off its sediment are the whole point of the recipe's first half. Rope-grown mussels sold today are far cleaner than the wild beds Ranhofer bought from, but still strain the liquor through a cloth and leave the last spoonful behind.
No salt at the startDeliberate — mussel liquor reduces to something already saltier than most stocks. Season only at the end, after the barley and water have diluted it.
BarleyHalf a pound of pearl barley simmered three hours in salted water with butter is the thickener; it should be collapsing and starchy, not al dente. Modern pearl barley softens well short of three hours, so cook it to texture rather than to the clock.
Mortar, tammy, blenderA tammy is a fine cloth strainer, and the fitted sieve-and-pestle apparatus described at the end is a purée press. A blender or food processor followed by a fine-mesh conical strainer does the same work; push the solids through with a ladle.
Red pepperCayenne. In Ranhofer's usage "red pepper" generally means ground dried capsicum, used in small amounts for warmth rather than heat.
Savarin croutonsCubes cut from a savarin, a yeast-risen cake baked in a ring mould, and dried in a low oven until crisp. Any close-crumbed enriched bread gives the same effect.
The "lean" note"Fat" bisques were built on meat broth, "lean" ones on fish broth for fast days. Milts are soft fish roe, and the "hearts of oysters" are the plump adductor muscle and body trimmed of the frill — garnishes that are largely period curiosities now.
Unopened shellsRanhofer cooks until the mussels open and says nothing about the rest. Current practice is to discard any that stay shut after the others have gaped.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of thirty years of cooking at Delmonico's in New York, where the house habit of naming dishes after regular patrons produced hundreds of titles like this one — the Cuttings were a prominent New York family of the period, though Ranhofer, as usual, gives no explanation. More interesting is what the recipe shows about the word bisque: in the nineteenth century it generally denoted a shellfish soup thickened by pounding the meat with a cooked grain — barley here, rice in many French versions — and passing the whole through a sieve, with butter added only at the end. The cream-heavy, tomato-tinted bisque most people picture today is a later simplification. Ranhofer's closing note on "lean" versus "fat" bisques is a survival of the Catholic fasting calendar in professional French kitchens, where a soup would often have both a meat-broth version and a fish-broth twin.