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Bisque of Lobster with Celery
Trim off the green part from a head of celery. Cut into very small pieces, thoroughly wash in fresh water, drain well on a sieve; place the celery in a saucepan with two pints water and a half teaspoon salt and boil for forty minutes. Drain on a sieve and keep this broth. Place the celery in a mortar with a well-washed live lobster, shell and all, and pound the whole to a paste. Place the paste in a saucepan with one ounce butter, stir well for one minute on the fire, then let cook for fifteen minutes, being careful to stir frequently meanwhile; then add two ounces flour, mix for a minute, let cook for two minutes. Pour in a quart hot milk, the above celery liquor and one gill cream. Season with two tea-spoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well with a whisk for two minutes, then boil for five minutes. Dilute one egg yolk in a tablespoon milk and add to the soup; mix while heating without boiling for two minutes. Strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
An old-style bisque in the true sense: the lobster is pounded raw, shell and all, and the shell does the flavoring before being strained out. Nothing about the method is unsound, but two steps need translating.
- The hinge: pound, then strain twiceAll the flavor comes from the shell, and all of it has to come back out. The double straining — first a fine sieve, then cheesecloth — is not fussiness; a single pass leaves grit and needle-sharp shell splinters in the bowl.
- Instead of a mortarFew kitchens have a mortar large enough. Dispatch and split the lobster (chill it in the freezer 20 minutes first, then split lengthwise through the head), then break the shell into pieces with a heavy knife and work it in a sturdy food processor with the celery in batches. Lobster shell is hard on blades and will crack a cheap plastic bowl; a mallet and a bowl is safer than an underpowered machine.
- MeasuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning works out to about half a teaspoon cayenne and a quarter teaspoon nutmeg. The two teaspoons of salt come on top of the half teaspoon already in the celery water — add half, taste at the end, and finish from there.
- A head of celeryThis means the whole bunch, not a single rib. Trimming "the green part" refers to the leafy tops and any dark outer stalks; the pale heart goes in with the rest.
- The celery brothForty minutes is a long boil for celery, but the point is extraction, not texture — the cooked celery is pounded to paste anyway and the liquid is the flavor base. Some of the two pints will boil away; use whatever liquor remains, and top it up with water if it has reduced far.
- Cooking out the pasteThe fifteen minutes of stirring before the flour goes in is where the shell gives up its color and aroma to the butter. Keep the heat moderate and keep moving; scorched shell paste turns the whole soup bitter and there is no correcting it.
- The egg yolkOnce the yolk goes in the soup must not boil, or it can curdle and straining will not fully restore it. Hold it below a simmer for the two minutes.
- YieldAround two quarts once strained, depending on how far the celery water reduced. It is rich; serve it in cups rather than bowls.
A bisque in this period meant a shellfish soup thickened with the pounded body of the creature itself — shell, coral and all — a technique French cookery inherited from an era when the mortar was the most important tool in the kitchen. Older versions leaned on pounded rice or bread for body; the roux of butter and flour here reflects late nineteenth-century professional practice, and the egg-yolk liaison at the end is straight out of the classical repertoire. The name is generally traced either to the Bay of Biscay or to the notion of something cooked twice, bis cuite; neither derivation is settled. The instruction to use a live lobster is practical rather than decorative: before refrigeration a dead lobster spoiled fast.