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Bisque of Fresh Scallops
Place one and a half pounds very fresh scallops in a saucepan with three pints water, four branches parsley, one bay leaf, three peppercorns, one blade mace, a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and the head of a clean, fresh whitefish. Boil for fifteen minutes, remove the fish heads and parsley, strain the broth into a basin and keep till required. Place the scallops in a mortar, pound to a paste and return to the broth.
Heat one tablespoon butter in a saucepan, adding two ounces flour; mix well while heating for one minute, then add the broth and scallops with a pint hot milk to this pan; mix well until it comes to a boil, then let slowly boil for ten minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a gill milk and add to the soup with a half ounce butter. Mix well while heating for two minutes, strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheese cloth into a soup tureen, and serve.
A classic pounded-shellfish bisque, thickened twice over — with a roux and again with egg yolk — and strained until it is smooth as cream. The straining is not optional; it is what separates a bisque from a chowder.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon, which is assertive in a soup of this size. Two ounces of flour is by weight, roughly a half cup.
- The fish headA whitefish head is a stock ingredient, used for gelatin and sweetness rather than flesh. Any mild white fish frame from a fishmonger does the same work; ask for it gutted and gill-free, since gills turn a broth bitter and cloudy.
- Blade maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold today mostly ground. A blade is one whole piece; about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in, added to the strained broth rather than boiled long.
- Boiling the scallopsFifteen minutes would ruin scallops meant to be eaten whole — they seize and turn to rubber in two or three. Here they are pounded to a paste and strained out, so the loss is texture rather than dinner, but four or five minutes extracts the flavour without cooking the sweetness away.
- The mortarA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar was for. Purée the cooked scallops with a ladle of the broth to keep the machine moving, then whisk the paste back into the pot.
- Curdling at the endThe egg yolk and gill of milk are a liaison, and the soup must not boil after they go in. Temper the yolk with a little hot soup first, and hold the pan below a simmer for those two minutes.
- The double strainSieve first to catch the coarse solids, then through damp cheesecloth for the silk finish. Warm the tureen; a bisque this thin-bodied cools fast.
- YieldThree pints of broth plus a pint and a half-cup of milk is about eight and a half cups before cooking; after boiling and straining, closer to two quarts — first-course servings for eight.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the French professional training that governed American restaurant cooking around 1900. Bisque is generally traced to the Bay of Biscay, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French kitchens the word covered rich pounded soups of crayfish, pigeon or quail, and only later narrowed to shellfish. What survives from the older practice is the pounding: before blenders, the mortar was the only way to get the flesh of a shellfish into suspension, and the sieve-then-cheesecloth finish was the mark of a kitchen with enough hands to bother. Scallops stood in for the lobster or crayfish of the grand versions, and the whitefish head supplied the body that shells would otherwise have given.