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Bisque of Crawfish
Thoroughly wash thirty small live crawfish in cold water. Remove tails from eighteen of them, plunge in boiling water with a little vinegar and salt and boil ten minutes, drain, remove shells and keep tails on a plate until required. Thoroughly pound the thirty crawfish in mortar to a fine pulp. Heat one ounce butter in a large saucepan, add the crawfish, as well as a finely sliced carrot and one finely sliced onion, then briskly cook ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile; then add one pint fresh crushed tomatoes, two quarts broth, one-quarter pint white wine, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf, one clove and three ounces raw rice; season with a good teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper and let gently boil one hour, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Remove, pass the bisque through sieve into a basin, then through a fine Chinese strainer into a clean saucepan, set pan on fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil add one gill cream, a half ounce good butter, juice of a quarter of lemon and the crawfish tails. Continually mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Pour the bisque into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic shell-thickened bisque: the whole crustacean is pounded, simmered with rice, and pushed through a sieve, so the body and shell do all the flavoring work. A few of the measures and one piece of equipment need translating.
- What actually gets poundedEighteen crawfish give up their cooked tails for the garnish; their bodies go back in the mortar along with the twelve untouched raw ones. So you are pounding shells, heads and all — that is where the flavor and the color come from. A sturdy mortar works, but a food processor pulsed to a coarse paste is faster and does the same job.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup; a saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons cayenne" is half a teaspoon — assertive but not extreme in two quarts of soup. Three ounces of rice is a scant half cup of raw long-grain, and it is a thickener, not a garnish.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. The first pass through an ordinary sieve, pressing hard with a ladle, extracts the pulp; the second pass catches shell grit. Do not skip the second one, or the bisque will be sandy.
- Chervil and the herb bundleChervil is seasonal and hard to find; a little extra parsley plus a pinch of tarragon comes closer than parsley alone. Tie the parsley, chervil, bay leaf and clove together so they come out cleanly, though here everything is strained anyway.
- Boiling the tailsTen minutes in acidulated water is longer than tails need — three to four minutes at a bare boil is enough, and they are going back into hot soup at the end. Add them at the very last moment and heat through only.
- The finishOnce the cream, butter and lemon go in, bring it just to the boil and stop. Continued boiling after the lemon juice can break the cream, and the butter is there for gloss, not for cooking.
- Broth"Broth" here most likely means an unsalted or lightly salted stock. Judge the salt at the end; a modern salted stock plus the full teaspoon called for will be too much.
- YieldServes six to eight as a first course.
Bisque in this sense — a shellfish soup thickened with rice and finished with cream — is generally associated with the French professional kitchen of the late nineteenth century, and this version broadly follows that template: pound the whole animal, simmer with aromatics and rice, sieve twice, enrich at the last minute. The word's origin is disputed, often traced to the Bay of Biscay and sometimes to the idea of something "twice cooked," though both readings are folk tradition. Freshwater crawfish were a familiar choice in France, where écrevisses were long a kitchen staple. The insistence on live crawfish is not fussiness: crustaceans spoil fast once dead, and a bisque built on their pounded bodies has nowhere to hide an off one.