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Bisque of Clams, Clamart
Soak a half pint split green peas in cold water for six hours, drain, place in a saucepan with a sliced each carrot, onion, two sliced each leeks and branches celery, half-pound piece salt pork, a bay leaf, clove, two quarts water, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Set pan on range and let simmer for an hour and a half, remove, strain puree through sieve into a basin and keep in tureen until required.
Place fifteen freshly opened large clams in a saucepan with their liquor and one and a half pints water, add two branches parsley and one branch chervil, then let boil for five minutes. Mix in a saucepan an ounce butter with two a half ounces flour, heat a minute, then strain clam broth into pan; also add peas puree and a pint milk. Continually mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, finely chop clams and add to soup, with saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg. Lightly mix and boil for twenty-five minutes, then add a half gill cream and half ounce butter, mix well for two minutes, remove, strain soup through a Chinese strainer into a tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A two-part soup: a split pea puree and a clam velouté, combined and strained. The pea base can be made a day ahead, which is the only way this comes together at a reasonable pace.
- Measures translatedA half pint of split peas is one cup, roughly 7 oz dry. A gill is half a cup, so the half gill of cream at the end is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, and here it means a bare pinch of cayenne and of nutmeg.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical sieve. A fine-mesh strainer works; press the solids through with a ladle rather than letting it drip, or you lose most of the body.
- Salt pork and saltThe half-pound piece of salt pork plus a teaspoon of salt plus clam liquor will push this well past modern tolerance. Add no salt at the start, and season only after the pea puree and clam broth are combined.
- The clamsFifteen large clams means quahogs or large cherrystones, about 3 lb in the shell. Steam them open rather than shucking raw if that is easier; keep every drop of liquor and pour it off the grit.
- The clam timingFive minutes to open, then twenty-five minutes of boiling once chopped, will make the clam meat tough. Since the finished soup is strained anyway, the clams here are working as flavour rather than texture — but if you want recognisable clam in the bowl, hold back some of the chopped meat and stir it in off the heat at the end.
- Roux ratioOne ounce butter to two and a half ounces flour is a dry, flour-heavy roux by modern habit. Cook it a full two minutes so it does not taste raw, and add the hot clam broth gradually; the pea puree is already thick, so expect a very substantial soup and thin with more milk if needed.
- ScorchingOnce the milk and pea puree are in, the pan wants a heat diffuser or a low flame and constant stirring. Pea starch settles and catches fast, and a scorched note runs through the whole tureen.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. Bread croutons served alongside rather than floated, as the original directs; it does not say how they are to be made.
In classical French menu language Clamart signals green peas: the name is generally traced to the town of Clamart, south-west of Paris, whose market gardens were said to be known for early petits pois, and in time any garnish or soup built on peas could carry the label. What is happening on this page is a piece of transatlantic grafting — an American clam bisque given a French surname by folding it into a pea purée that could be written on a menu in the same idiom as a consommé. The method itself is straight escoffier-era practice: a vegetable purée, a velouté on the shellfish broth for richness, and a final pass through the chinois that erases every trace of the ingredients' original texture.