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Bisque of Lobster, Julienne
Cut into small julienne strips two small carrots, one white turnip, two leeks, one medium white onion, two branches celery and a quarter of a very small white cabbage. Mix them together, then place in a saucepan with half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, one teaspoon sugar and two gills water. Mix well, cover pan and set in oven fifty minutes, remove and keep hot. Prepare a bisque of lobster and add the above prepared vegetables, mix a little, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a garnish recipe rather than a soup recipe: it assumes you already have a lobster bisque and tells you what to put in it. Read it as two jobs, one of which the book leaves to another page.
- Two gills of waterA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. That is enough to steam-braise the vegetables without leaving a pool of liquid to dilute the bisque.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Fifty minutes covered is consistent with a moderate oven, 325-350F; the vegetables should soften and glaze in their own liquid, not brown.
- The julienne itselfStrips of about 1/8 inch square and 1 to 1 1/2 inches long. Uniformity is the whole point of the garnish, and vegetables cut thicker will still be firm when the softer leek and cabbage have collapsed.
- Cut them separately, cook them togetherCarrot and turnip take the longest, cabbage and leek the least. If precision matters, add the cabbage and leek for the final 20 minutes rather than at the start.
- The missing bisque"Prepare a bisque of lobster" points to a separate recipe in the same book. A period bisque means lobster shells pounded and simmered for their flavour, thickened with rice or bread and enriched with cream, then strained; anything with that character will suit the garnish.
- Add at the last momentThe vegetables go in off the heat, or barely at a simmer. Boiling them in the bisque undoes the careful cut and clouds a soup that has just been strained.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives no yield and does not say how much bisque to make. The vegetables as written would be a generous garnish for roughly six to eight cups of bisque; if your bisque is a smaller batch, halve the vegetables rather than crowding the tureen.
- The teaspoon of sugarThe recipe does not say why it is there; a little sugar with butter and water is the usual way of glazing such vegetables, and it may also soften the edge turnip and cabbage bring to shellfish. Leave it in.
"Julienne" is a cut, not a place, and cookery writers generally trace the term to eighteenth-century French kitchens, where it came to mean vegetables shredded into fine matchsticks for clear soups, though the origin of the name itself is not settled; by 1900 a dish labelled julienne on a hotel menu would usually be understood to arrive garnished that way. Bisque has a longer and vaguer history: the word once covered rich pureed soups of game or pigeon as well as shellfish, and over the nineteenth century it came to attach chiefly to crustaceans, whose pounded shells give the soup its colour and depth. Pairing the two here is a piece of grand-hotel logic common in turn-of-the-century international cookbooks, which built menus by combining a base preparation with a named garnish, and expected the cook to already have the base at hand on another page. The touch of butter, sugar and a little water to soften vegetables under a lid is close to the French étuver (with the sugar tipping it toward glacer), still a standard method for a glazed vegetable garnish.