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Bisque of Grouse
Cut head and feet off a fine fat grouse, draw and wipe. Cut breasts in small pieces and thoroughly pound in mortar with two egg yolks to a pulp, remove, place on a plate and keep until required. Cut legs and carcass in small pieces. Cut a carrot, onion, four shallots, bean garlic and two branches celery in slices. Thoroughly heat one ounce butter in a saucepan, add all grouse bones, vegetables, and nicely brown for fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Sprinkle over two tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for two minutes, moisten with a pint each demi-glace and pure tomato juice and three pints broth. Add a sprig thyme, bay leaf, clove, teaspoon allspice and half gill sherry. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well and let slowly boil for one hour, mixing once in a while. Then add little by little the puree, sharply mix with a wooden spoon while cooking for five minutes, strain the bisque through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into a soup tureen, and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
N. B. Any kind of game, such as partridges, pheasants, blackcocks, ptarmigans, wild ducks, etc., can be used in place of the grouse.
A game purée soup of the professional kind, written for a kitchen with demi-glace already on hand. The work divides cleanly: a brown game stock built from the bones, and a raw forcemeat of breast and egg yolk stirred in at the end to thicken and flavour it.
- The hinge: the breast puréeThe pounded breast and egg yolks are a liaison, not an ingredient to be boiled. Pull the pot down to a bare simmer, no more than a lazy bubble, before whisking it in a spoonful at a time, or the yolks will scramble and the soup will turn grainy and grey. Five minutes at that heat is enough to cook it through.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 4 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, which makes two saltspoons of cayenne about 1/2 teaspoon: assertive but not unreasonable in five pints of liquid. Season toward the low end and correct at the end.
- "Bean garlic"Almost certainly a compositor's slip for a clove of garlic, or possibly "bean of garlic" for a single small clove. One clove is the sensible reading; the recipe already carries four shallots.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened in the old style with a brown roux. A pint of good commercial demi-glace or the same volume of homemade brown stock reduced by half will do; if you use unreduced stock, expect a thinner soup.
- Mortar and Chinese strainerA food processor does the breast and yolks in seconds, though scrape down twice so no fibres escape. The "Chinese strainer" is a chinois; a fine-mesh sieve lined with a rinsed cloth gives the same clarity.
- The birdA red grouse runs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb dressed, though the recipe gives no weight and the substitutes named vary a good deal in size. "Draw and wipe" means gut it and wipe the cavity clean rather than wash it. Frozen imported red grouse or any of the substitutes named in the note behave much the same way; a wild duck will give a much fattier, stronger stock, so skim harder.
- Bones and browningFifteen minutes over real heat is the point of the recipe, and the colour on the bones is where the soup's flavour lives. A wide pan matters more than the timing; crowd the bones and they steam.
- YieldRoughly five pints of liquid going in, reduced over the hour to eight to ten first-course servings. Serve the croutons separately as directed, since they soften at once in a soup this rich.
"Bisque" reached English as a term for a rich, sieved purée soup, and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was applied to game as freely as to shellfish; the near-exclusive modern association with lobster and crab came later. The pounded raw breast finished into the hot liquid is an older thickening method than the flour roux that also appears here, and the recipe carries both, which is characteristic of turn-of-the-century restaurant cooking in the Franco-American manner. Grouse and the birds listed in the note appear in books of this period as market goods rather than sportsmen's trophies: American game dealers sold wild birds openly until federal and state restrictions on the traffic in wild game tightened after 1900, and a chef writing then could still order partridge, ptarmigan and blackcock by the brace. The demi-glace assumption is the surest sign of the book's intended reader, since only a kitchen keeping a standing stockpot would have a pint of it to spare on soup.