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Bisque of Mussels
Procure forty-eight large fresh mussels, wash thoroughly and place in a saucepan with one and a half quarts water and six branches parsley, boil for fifteen minutes, drain on a sieve and keep the broth. Remove the mussels from the shells and finely chop them up. Heat one ounce of butter in a saucepan, add two ounces flour, stir well with a wooden spoon while heating for two minutes, then add the mussels, broth and a pint and a half milk. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix for two minutes, then let boil for five minutes. Skim the scum from the surface, add half ounce butter in small bits and a half gill cream; mix well for two minutes, strain through a Chinese strainer into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, and serve with bread croutons separately.
A classic French-style shellfish bisque, thickened with a roux rather than the older rice or bread. The archaic measures are easy to convert; the cooking times need more judgment.
- Quantity of musselsForty-eight large mussels is roughly 4 to 5 lb in the shell, which yields about 1 lb of picked meat. Buy them live, with tightly closed shells, and scrub and debeard just before cooking.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longMussels open in 4 to 6 minutes over a good heat and turn tough and shrunken beyond that. Cook covered only until the shells gape, then pull them out.
- Water and brothA quart and a half of water is more liquid than needed to open mussels and will dilute the flavor. Less water, or water and dry white wine, gives a broth worth building on; reduce it if it tastes thin before adding it to the roux.
- GritMussel liquor often carries sand. Let the broth settle and decant it off the sediment, or pour it through a coffee filter, before it goes anywhere near the soup; the two final strainings at the end are no substitute for cleaning the broth first.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so the recipe calls for roughly 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of cream 1/4 cup. Half a teaspoon of cayenne in this volume is assertive by modern taste; start with a quarter.
- Chinese strainerThis is the conical chinois. A fine-mesh sieve pressed with a ladle does the same work, and the cheesecloth pass afterward gives the smooth, almost velvety body that defines a bisque.
- Finish off the heatAdd the butter and cream after the soup has stopped boiling and do not return it to a boil, or the enriched base will break and the mussel flavor will go flat.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. Fry the croutons in butter and pass them separately as directed; they are meant to stay crisp.
Bisque in its oldest sense was a shellfish soup thickened with the pounded bodies and shells of crayfish or lobster, and the name is generally traced to the Bay of Biscay, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Mussels were the democratic choice among bisque shellfish, cheap along both French and American coasts and long treated in English-speaking kitchens with more suspicion than they deserved. The double straining, the chinois, the croutons handed round separately all belong to the professional French service.