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Bisque of Oysters, Capucine
Place thirty-six freshly opened oysters with their juice into a saucepan with a pint of extra oyster liquor, two and a half quarts water, and let boil for five minutes. Lift up the oysters with the skimmer and chop very finely, return them to the broth, add two sliced onions, one sliced leek, two sliced branches celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf, two cloves, a sprig thyme, four ounces raw rice, one pint milk, a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, cover the pan, and let slowly boil for one hour and twenty-five minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Rub through a sieve into a basin, replace it in the same saucepan and let come to a boil. Dilute two egg yolks with one gill cream, add to the soup with half an ounce butter, and stir well while heating for two minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, add four tablespoons cooked green peas, gently mix and serve.
A classic hotel-kitchen bisque, thickened with rice rather than flour and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Nothing here is difficult, but two steps decide whether it succeeds.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil again. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, return it off the heat, and hold the pan below a simmer for the two minutes given. A boil scrambles the yolks and the final straining will not save it.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is roughly half a teaspoon in two and a half quarts of liquid cthat is assertive but not extreme; start with half and correct at the end.
- Oysters and liquorThirty-six shucked oysters is about a quart with their liquor, more if they are large. The additional pint of "extra oyster liquor" could be had from a fishmonger; bottled clam juice, or the strained liquor saved from a second dozen, stands in for it.
- Why the long simmerAn hour and twenty-five minutes would ruin whole oysters, but here they are chopped and destined for a sieve. The time is really for the four ounces of rice to collapse completely and thicken the broth. Stir often; rice settles and scorches.
- SievingA food mill with the medium plate does the work of "rub through a sieve" quickly. A blender will emulsify the oyster solids too finely and give a slightly gluey texture, so mill first, then push through a fine strainer if you want it very smooth.
- ChervilIf you cannot find it, use a little extra parsley plus a few tarragon leaves rather than omitting the note entirely; chervil sits between the two.
- Milk in an acidic brothMilk -- The milk goes in early and may look slightly separated after the long simmer with salty oyster liquor; the sieving and the final liaison largely smooth it out.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts finished, serving eight as a first course. The peas go in at the very end so they stay green and separate.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent years at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe carries the marks of that kitchen -- rice as the thickener, a strict egg-and-cream liaison, and a garnish name appended to the dish. Early French bisques were rich soups thickened with rice or with pounded bread, long before the word narrowed to mean anything creamy; the technique here, cooking the shellfish into the broth and forcing the whole through a sieve, is the older method. "Capucine" is one of the garnish designations that nineteenth-century restaurant menus used to distinguish otherwise similar soups; its derivation is uncertain, and by Filippini's day such names were often applied loosely. Oysters were cheap and abundant on the American Atlantic coast in this period.