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Bisque of Clams
Carefully open thirty-six medium-sized fresh clams and place in a saucepan with all their liquor, adding one and a half quarts hot water. Cover the pan and boil for twenty minutes; drain and keep the liquor. Place the clams in a mortar and pound them to a paste, then replace the paste in the clam liquor. Heat in another saucepan one ounce melted butter, add two and a half ounces flour, stir briskly with a wooden spoon for one minute; then pour in the clam liquor, etc., into this pan, add half pint hot milk and two gills cream. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well with the whisk and as soon as it comes to a boil, add half ounce of good butter, divided in small bits; whisk till the butter is melted. Strain through a sieve, then through a cheesecloth into a hot soup tureen and serve with bread croutons.
A pre-blender bisque, thickened partly by roux and partly by the pounded clam meat itself. The double straining at the end is not optional fussiness — it is what separates this from clam chowder.
- The clamsThirty-six medium clams means hard-shell clams — littlenecks or small cherrystones — roughly 4-5 lb in the shell. Rinse the shells well and strain the liquor through cheesecloth to catch grit before it gets into the soup.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons cayenne comes to half a teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate, and one saltspoon nutmeg is a quarter teaspoon.
- Salt with restraintThe teaspoon of salt assumes the clam liquor has been diluted with a quart and a half of water. Taste before adding any of it — clam liquor from farmed clams today can be very saline.
- Twenty minutes is correct hereNormally clams cooked this long would be ruined, but they are pounded to a paste and strained out, so the long boil is building stock rather than serving the clams. No modern correction is needed.
- Mortar workA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar does in ten minutes. Pulse the drained clams to a coarse paste with a ladle of the liquor, then return the whole thing to the pot.
- The roux ratioTwo and a half ounces of flour to one ounce of butter is a very dry, sandy roux by modern standards. Keep the heat low and the spoon moving for the full minute so it cooks without colouring, then add the hot liquor gradually to avoid lumps.
- Finishing butterThe half ounce of butter is whisked in just as the soup comes to the boil, as the recipe directs, and is what gives it its gloss. Add it in small pieces and whisk only until melted; a hard boil afterwards can break the emulsion and leave the surface oily.
- StrainingSieve first to remove the clam solids, then pass through damp cheesecloth. Skipping the second pass leaves a gritty, granular texture that the recipe is specifically designed to eliminate.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; from the liquid quantities it should come to roughly two quarts finished, enough for six to eight as a first course. Warm the tureen and bowls — a buttered bisque cools fast and skins over.
Bisque is now understood as a soup of crustaceans — crayfish, lobster, shrimp — though early French bisques were frequently made of pigeon, quail or other birds, and the shellfish association is the later sense; the name is generally traced either to the Bay of Biscay or to the idea of something twice-cooked, though neither derivation is settled. What defined it in nineteenth-century professional kitchens was the method rather than the animal: the shellfish was pounded in a mortar to a paste, worked back into its own cooking liquor, and then forced through sieve and cloth so that the body of the soup came from the flesh itself. That is exactly what happens here, with clams standing in for lobster, which is why the mortar and the double straining are the heart of the recipe. The dish is plausibly a product of the era of the American grand hotel and restaurant kitchen, where clams were cheap and abundant on both coasts and could be given the full French treatment; the heavy hand with cayenne and nutmeg may reflect that period's seasoning of cream soups, where a little heat and a little spice are said to have been used to keep the dairy from tasting flat.