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Bisque of Prawns, Carolina
Thoroughly wash and drain one and a half pounds fresh prawns. Heat an ounce butter in a saucepan, add prawns, with a finely sliced small carrot, an onion, a leek and two branches celery, briskly cook for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile, then place in mortar and pound to a pulp. Remove and place in the pan again, pour in one gill white wine, a quart fresh or canned tomatoes and one and a half quarts water. Add two branches parsley, a branch chervil and a heaping teaspoon salt, mix well with wooden spoon and briskly cook for ten minutes. Add three ounces raw Carolina rice, mix well and let gently boil for an hour, occasionally mixing at bottom. Press bisque through sieve into a vessel, then through Chinese strainer into a saucepan and reset on fire. As soon as it comes to boil add a gill cream, half ounce good butter, a handful freshly cooked rice, two saltspoons cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well while cooking for five minutes, pour into soup tureen and serve.
A classic rice-thickened shellfish bisque of the sort French chefs cooked in American hotel kitchens around 1900. Most of the work is extraction and straining; the rest is seasoning.
- The hinge: everything goes through the sieveThe flavour lives in the shells and heads, which is why the whole prawns are pounded and simmered rather than picked. Sieve twice as directed — a coarse pass to break the pulp, then a fine chinois — because a single shell splinter in the tureen ruins the dish.
- Mortar or machineA blender or food processor does in seconds what the mortar did by hand. Pulse the cooked prawns and vegetables to a coarse paste; do not attempt to puree the shells smooth, they only need breaking up to release flavour before the long simmer.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The recipe calls for one of white wine and one of cream.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon in roughly two quarts of soup — assertive but not extreme; add half, taste at the end, then adjust.
- Carolina riceBy 1900 'Carolina' named a long-grain rice associated with the South Carolina lowcountry, though by then much of the crop was grown elsewhere in the South; it was prized for cooking dry and separate. Ordinary long-grain white rice is the right substitute; three ounces is a scant half cup. Do not use converted or parboiled rice, which resists breaking down into the thickening pulp the soup depends on.
- PrawnsHead-on shell-on shrimp of any size will do, and heads matter more than size. If only headless shell-on shrimp are available, buy the same weight and expect a lighter soup; peeled shrimp will not give a bisque at all.
- Watch the bottom during the hourRice sinks and scorches. Use a heavy pan over low heat and stir down to the base every ten minutes; a burnt note cannot be strained out.
- ChervilSold fresh in few places now. A small amount of flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon approximates its faint anise character; leaving it out costs less than substituting dried.
- YieldRoughly two and a half quarts before reduction — six to eight servings as a first course. The garnish of freshly cooked rice goes in whole at the end, after the straining.
Bisque in its older French sense was a purée soup thickened with rice or with pounded bread, long before the roux-and-cream version most cooks now assume; the technique of pounding whole crustaceans and forcing them through a sieve is what gives the soup its depth, and is sometimes said to give it its name as well, though the origin of "bisque" is disputed and a derivation from Biscay is often proposed. Filippini's tag "Carolina" refers to the rice, not to the shrimp — Carolina long-grain was the standard American table rice of the era, grown in the tidal fields of the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, and its name appeared in recipe titles the way "Arborio" does today, as a mark of quality rather than a geographic conceit. That a Delmonico's restaurant man would reach for it in a French bisque says a good deal about the period: the kitchen was French in method and thoroughly American in supply.