No. 212

Bisque of Shrimps a la Melville

Bisque de Crevettes a la Melville

Throw one pound of shrimps into boiling, unsalted water and cook them for five minutes, drain, then dredge them over with salt and toss in a colander to mix the salt in well; when cold, shell the tails and keep them for garnishing. Mince one carrot, one onion, a celery stalk and two leeks, fry these in butter with one bay leaf and moisten with three quarts of either fish or vegetable stock and half a bottleful of wine; boil for twenty-five minutes, then put into this broth two pounds of raw shrimps and the shells of the tails reserved for the garnishing; boil for five minutes longer, then drain. Put into a stewpan two pounds of sliced bread, cover it with broth and let simmer for twenty minutes, then drain it on a sieve, pound the shrimps, add the moistened bread, and continue pounding until all is reduced to a paste, then dilute with the shrimp broth, and press all through a fine sieve, season and strain through a tammy. Heat it up till near the boiling point, but do not allow it to boil, then thicken with eight egg-yolks diluted with two gills of cream and a quarter of a pound of good butter, incorporating it vigorously into the bisque with a spoon, then pour it into a very hot tureen, with the shrimp tails cut into three or four pieces as a garnishing.

← No. 211 Bisque of Shrimps a la Veragua Soups & Broths No. 213 Bisque of Shrimps, Bretonne →

For the Modern Kitchen

A bread-thickened bisque in the older French manner, scaled for a restaurant brigade. The whole thing hinges on the finish: once the egg yolks go in, the soup must never boil.

The liaisonEight yolks with cream and butter will scramble the moment the soup simmers. Bring the strained bisque to just below a simmer, temper a ladleful into the yolk-cream mixture, return it off the heat and whisk hard; hold it below 180F thereafter.
Gills and bottlesTwo gills of cream is one cup. "Half a bottleful" of wine works out to roughly 12 fl oz if you measure against a modern 750 ml bottle; the recipe does not say which wine, though a dry white is the usual choice for shellfish.
Two pounds of breadThis is the thickener that a modern bisque would get from rice or roux. Use stale white bread with crusts removed; fresh sandwich bread turns to paste and dulls the flavor. Expect a very thick liquid before you dilute it back with the shrimp broth.
PoundingRanhofer means a mortar. A food processor does the shrimp-and-bread paste in a minute, but pulse rather than run it, and pass everything through a chinois afterward to catch shell grit.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people. A conical strainer lined with damp cheesecloth gives the same result.
Fry these in butterSweat the carrot, onion, celery and leek gently until soft without color. Browning them pushes the soup toward a mirepoix stock flavor and muddies the pale pink the finished bisque should have.
The shrimpThree pounds total: one boiled for the garnish, two raw for the puree. Head-on or shell-on shrimp are worth seeking out here, since the shells carry most of the flavor the recipe is after.
YieldThree quarts of stock plus the enrichments makes something like 12 to 16 first-course servings. Halving or quartering the recipe works cleanly.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades of cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter carries a long run of bisques distinguished largely by garnish and name. Bisque came to mean a thick shellfish soup bound with bread or pounded crusts; the rice-thickened, cream-heavy version now more familiar came later, and the bread here is the older method preserved. Names like "a la Melville" and the neighboring "a la Veragua" appear to follow the house habit of honoring patrons, visiting dignitaries and private-dining-room clients, so the dish is usually a standard preparation given a personal label rather than an invention of its own; the particular Melville intended is not identified in the book. The scale — three quarts of stock, three pounds of shrimp, eight yolks — is a reminder that these are restaurant formulas set down for other professionals, not household recipes.