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Bisque of Oyster, Nassau
Finely chop three medium Bermuda onions and boil in a saucepan with a pint milk for twenty minutes. Place twenty-four large, freshly opened oysters with their liquor in a large saucepan with a quart and a half water, three branches chopped celery and two branches parsley, then boil for twenty minutes. Strain the broth through a Chinese strainer into the milk pan. Place the oysters and celery in a mortar, pound to a pulp and add to the broth. Knead two and a half ounces flour in a saucepan with one ounce butter and heat on the range for one minute, then pour the oyster broth into this pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, remove from the fire, add a gill cream and half an ounce good butter; mix well for two minutes, strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic thickened shellfish purée soup, written for a kitchen with a mortar and a chinois. It scales to about six servings.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is about half a teaspoon — assertive in a soup this size. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the end.
- Chinese strainerA chinois: the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works here. The recipe strains three times in all: the first pass separates the broth from the oyster and celery solids, and the later sieve and cheesecloth passes are for texture.
- Bermuda onionsA large, mild, flat sweet onion. Vidalia, Walla Walla or any sweet white onion is the right substitute; a standard yellow onion will make the soup sharper.
- The twenty-minute oystersBoiling oysters that long would ruin them in a stew, but here they are pounded to a pulp and strained out, so the long simmer is extraction, not cooking. Do not borrow the timing for any dish where the oysters are eaten whole.
- Instead of the mortarA blender or food processor does the pounding in seconds. Purée the drained oysters and celery with a ladle of the hot broth, then return that to the pan — the subsequent sieving catches whatever the blades miss.
- The roux is flour-heavyTwo and a half ounces of flour to one ounce of butter will not form a smooth paste. Use equal weights (about 2 oz butter to 2 oz flour), cook a minute without colouring, and whisk the hot broth in gradually; the extra half ounce of butter is still added off the heat at the end.
- Finish off the fireThe cream and final butter go in with the pan off the heat, and the soup should not boil again afterwards or it will thin and separate. Reheat gently if it stands.
- YieldRoughly six generous cups — six first-course servings. Serve hot in warmed cups; oyster crackers or croûtons are period-appropriate.
Bisque in its older French sense meant a soup built from pounded shellfish, thickened by the purée itself and by rice or breadcrumbs before flour-and-butter roux became standard; the pounding in a mortar and the triple straining here belong to that older method. Place-name soups of this kind were common on period menus, and hotel and restaurant chefs named soups freely, so the label functioned more as a menu flourish than a claim of origin — whether any kitchen in Nassau ever made it this way is another matter.