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Bisque of Soft-Shell Crabs
Heat in a saucepan one ounce melted butter, add half a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, one branch sliced celery and two branches parsley; stir well and cook for fifteen minutes, mixing lightly occasionally. Pound to a pulp in a mortar eight live, thoroughly washed soft-shell crabs and add to the pan; stir well and slowly cook for ten minutes; then add two and a half ounces flour. Briskly stir and heat for five minutes; pour in one and a half quarts hot milk and briskly whisk for two minutes. Season with a light tablespoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and let slowly boil for twenty minutes; then add three egg yolks diluted with two gills cream; briskly stir again for two minutes, without boiling. Strain through a cheesecloth into a hot soup tureen and serve with bread croutons separately.
A French shellfish bisque built on the whole crab, shell and all, which is why the straining step is not optional. Filippini's measurements are by weight and in old volume units; the seasoning needs a cautious hand.
- The straining is the recipeEverything depends on forcing the soup through cheesecloth or a fine chinois at the end. Pounded crab leaves fibrous solids behind, so strain twice if the first pass looks gritty, and press hard on the solids to extract the flavour.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons cayenne is half a teaspoon, and the nutmeg is a quarter teaspoon. One ounce of butter is two tablespoons; two and a half ounces of flour is about half a cup plus a tablespoon.
- SaltA "light tablespoon" of salt for six cups of milk (seven cups of liquid once the cream goes in) is heavy by current taste, and would be brutal with fine-grain table salt. Start with a teaspoon and correct after straining, when the crab has given up its own saltiness.
- Butter to flourTwo tablespoons of butter will not carry half a cup of flour. Either add another tablespoon or two once the crab goes in, or accept that the flour is thickening in crab fat and liquid rather than a proper roux.
- The crabsSoft-shells are sold live or freshly killed and cleaned; a live crab is the freshest but should be dispatched before pounding. Eight small crabs is roughly a pound and a half. A food processor does the mortar's work in twenty seconds, though it chops rather than crushes, so pulse until pasty.
- Heat control at the endOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not return to a boil or it will curdle and no amount of whisking will bring it back. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolk mixture with a ladleful of hot soup first, then stir it in.
- Consistency and yieldA quart and a half of milk gives a thin, drinkable bisque of the kind served in cups. Expect six to eight servings; the croutons are meant to be passed at the table, not floated in advance.
Bisque in its older French sense is a soup thickened with the pounded bodies of crustaceans rather than with cream alone, and the word is generally traced to Biscay, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. What makes this version American is the crab itself: soft-shell blue crabs, harvested in the days after moulting when the whole animal is edible, were a distinctly Atlantic-coast luxury. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, was exactly the sort of cook to graft that local ingredient onto classical French method: a French technique applied to an American catch, strained through cheesecloth and sent out in a tureen.