Home › The World's Kitchen › Bisque, Bonne Bouche
Bisque, Bonne Bouche
Cut half a medium raw fowl in very small pieces (meat and bones), place in a large saucepan with half a sliced carrot, a sliced onion, two sliced leeks, a sliced branch celery and two ounces butter. Set pan on brisk fire and brown fifteen minutes, then add two ounces flour, stir well and lightly brown six minutes more, lightly stirring meanwhile. Pour in a quart white broth, one pint of demi-glace, one pint pure tomato juice, and add two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf and one clove. Season with teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well and simmer one hour. Skim off fat once in a while. Place six fresh chicken livers in a small saucepan with tablespoon melted butter, the scraped red part of a carrot, three chopped shallots, one crushed bay leaf, saltspoon thyme, and gently brown on brisk fire five minutes. Pour in half gill sherry. Cover pan and cook ten minutes. Transfer the whole to a mortar and pound to a pulp, then add the pulp, little by little, to the soup, mix while boiling five minutes. Add an ounce butter in little bits; mix well. Pass the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a tureen and serve with croutons, separately.
A poultry bisque in the older French sense — a thickened, sieved soup built on browned fowl and finished with a pounded liver purée. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are written in units that have fallen out of use and the finishing steps are where the dish is won or lost.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning is 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of sherry 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup).
- Brisk fireMedium-high to high heat on a modern burner. The fifteen-minute browning of the chopped fowl is where the soup's colour and depth come from; go pale here and no amount of simmering recovers it.
- White broth and demi-glaceWhite broth is unbrowned chicken or veal stock. Demi-glace is a reduced brown sauce — a pint of good commercial demi-glace or heavily reduced brown veal stock will stand in. Together with the tomato juice these are the whole liquid base, two quarts before reduction.
- Half a medium fowl, bones and allA fowl in this period is a mature stewing hen. Half of one is about 2 lb with bone; half a whole chicken cut into small pieces works, and a cleaver or heavy knife is needed for the bones. The bones are there for body and are strained out at the end.
- The liver puréeThe livers are browned five minutes and cooked ten more with the sherry — they should be firm through, not pink, since they are pounded rather than cooked again for long. A food processor replaces the mortar; the pulp is added little by little to boiling soup so it disperses instead of setting into grains.
- Two strainingsSieve first to break through the liver solids and pull out the bones and aromatics, then pass through damp cheesecloth or a fine chinois for the smooth finish that distinguishes a bisque from a purée soup. Skip the second pass and the texture is noticeably grainy.
- Butter to finishThe final ounce of butter goes in in small bits, mixed until absorbed. The recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat, but butter mounted into a boiling soup is more likely to separate and leave the surface slick.
- YieldSomewhat less than the two quarts of liquid that go in, after an hour's simmering and two strainings. Croutons are served alongside rather than floated, so they stay crisp.
Bisque did not always mean shellfish. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French cookery it described a rich, highly seasoned soup of pounded game birds or poultry, thickened with the birds themselves and often finished with crayfish or livers; the shellfish-only sense hardened only in the nineteenth century and is now so complete that a poultry bisque reads as an anomaly. The name's origin is disputed — it is often traced to the Biscay coast, though that is traditional rather than documented. Bonne bouche means simply a good mouthful, a tidbit, and turns up as a garnish or flourish in the naming of dishes throughout the grand-hotel repertoire this book draws on. The method — brown, thicken with flour, moisten with two stocks, simmer, pound, sieve twice — is straight Escoffier-era professional practice, written for a kitchen with a mortar, a tamis and someone to work them.