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Bisque of Codfish
Boil two quarts water in a saucepan with tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; add one saltspoon thyme, one bay leaf, two cloves, one medium, sliced carrot, one sliced onion, one leek, two branches celery, two branches parsley, all sliced. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for thirty minutes. Add one pound fresh codfish cut into pieces, and bones. Re-cover the pan and boil for fifteen minutes. Heat in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, adding three tablespoons flour; stir while heating for one minute. Strain the fish broth into this roux and briskly whisk for a minute. Then add one gill milk and two gills cream. Season with a saltspoon grated nutmeg and saltspoon cayenne pepper; mix with a wooden spoon while boiling for five minutes. Dilute one egg yolk with a tablespoon milk and add to the bisque, constantly mixing while heating, without boiling, for one minute. Strain through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A court-bouillon soup thickened with roux and finished with an egg liaison. The fish flavours the broth and is then strained out, so this is a clear-tasting cream soup rather than a modern chunky bisque.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the diluted egg yolk goes in, the soup must not boil or it will curdle into threads. Hold it just below a simmer, around 180F, stirring for the full minute, then strain and serve.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so the finish is 1/2 cup milk and 1 cup cream, plus the extra tablespoon of milk for the yolk.
- Reduce the brothThree tablespoons of flour will not thicken two quarts of liquid to soup consistency. Expect the court-bouillon to lose volume over the 45 minutes of boiling, and reduce it further to about a quart before straining it onto the roux if you want body.
- Fifteen minutes on the codThat is long past done for a pound of fish, but here it is deliberate: the flesh is being used to make stock and is left behind when the broth is strained onto the roux. If you want to eat the cod, lift it out after four or five minutes and return the bones and trimmings to the pot.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in two quarts is reasonable for a poaching liquid, but if you reduce the broth it will concentrate. Salt lightly at the start and correct at the end.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in a cream soup of this size is noticeable heat by period standards and by ours. Add half, taste, and adjust before the yolk goes in.
- StrainingCheesecloth over a fine sieve is right; the point is to catch the aromatics and any flour lumps. Warm the tureen first, since the soup is served just off the boil and cools fast.
- YieldAbout four to six cups finished, serving four as a first course.
Bisque in French cookery originally meant a rich, strained, puréed soup, most often of crayfish or other shellfish, and only later narrowed in English usage to mean a shellfish cream soup specifically. A codfish bisque like this one sits in the older, broader sense: the defining features are the strained aromatic base, the cream, and the egg-yolk liaison, not the crustacean. The word is often traced to the Bay of Biscay, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled; a derivation from bis cuit, twice-cooked, has also been proposed. Cod was a natural fish for such a treatment — cheap, firm, widely available on both sides of the Atlantic, and long associated with fast days, when a meatless soup still had to be rich enough to open a dinner. The method is the standard sequence: build a court-bouillon, cook the fish in it, bind the resulting broth with a roux, enrich, finish off the heat, strain.