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Bisque of Pickerel
Slice a medium-sized onion, one medium-sized carrot, two chopped branches parsley, two sliced leeks, two stalks sliced celery, one bean crushed garlic, two saltspoons thyme, one sprig bay leaf, two cloves, ten black peppers and twenty allspice. Place all these ingredients in a saucepan with three quarts cold water. Season with one tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and boil for forty-five minutes. Cut a fresh pickerel of two pounds into small pieces and add to the broth. Cover the pan and boil again for twenty minutes. Have in a saucepan one and a half ounces melted butter with two and a half ounces flour; briskly stir while heating for two minutes. Then strain the fish broth into the pan with the flour, briskly whisk for a minute, add a saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix a little, boil for five minutes. Dilute one egg yolk in half gill cold cream, add to the bisque, with half ounce good butter, mix well; heat without boiling for five minutes. Strain the bisque into a soup tureen and serve with bread croutons separately.
A vegetable-and-spice court bouillon, a fish simmered in it, then the strained broth thickened with roux and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Nearly everything solid is discarded; the soup is the point.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the egg yolk and cream go in, the soup must not boil — hold it below about 180F or the yolk scrambles and the bisque turns grainy. "Heat without boiling for five minutes" is the whole instruction; take it literally and stir.
- Old measuresA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A "bean" of garlic is one clove. Butter and flour by weight: 1 1/2 oz butter is 3 tablespoons, 2 1/2 oz flour is a scant 2/3 cup.
- PickerelIn American usage of the period this usually meant a young pike or, loosely, walleye. Any firm freshwater fish works; a 2 lb whole fish cut up, bones and head included, is what gives the broth its body. Skinless fillets alone will make a thinner soup.
- Twenty allspiceTwenty allspice berries against ten peppercorns is a heavy hand by modern taste, and allspice dominates quickly. Six to eight berries gives the warm background note without turning the soup into mulling spice.
- Cooking timesForty-five minutes for the vegetable broth is fine. Twenty minutes of hard boiling for the fish is longer than needed — the flesh is spent either way since it is strained out, but a hard boil clouds the broth. A bare simmer for 15 minutes extracts as much and strains clearer.
- The roux stage"Stir while heating for two minutes" means a white roux — no colour. Add the hot strained broth gradually to the fat and flour rather than all at once, and the five-minute boil afterwards is what cooks out the raw flour taste.
- StrainingStrain twice if you want the texture the name implies: once to remove fish and vegetables, once again through a fine sieve or cloth into the tureen. Bones are the reason the second strain matters.
- YieldThree quarts of water reduces to roughly two quarts of finished soup — six to eight servings as a first course. Croutons go to the table separately so they stay crisp.
"Bisque" now means a shellfish soup, but in nineteenth-century usage the word was applied more broadly to smooth, strained, enriched soups thickened with roux and finished with cream, crayfish and lobster versions being the best known. The word itself is of uncertain origin, often traced to the Spanish province of Biscay, though that connection is traditional rather than documented. Pickerel and pike were plentiful, cheap and bony, which suited a broth that would be strained rather than a fillet on a plate. The long spiced court bouillon does double duty here, seasoning the soup and masking the muddy note that freshwater fish can carry. Finishing with a yolk and cream liaison is a richer treatment than flour alone.