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Cream of Barley, Joinville
Cut heads off two one-and-a-half-pound lobsters, then cut balance into small pieces, place in a large saucepan with an ounce butter and briskly fry for fifteen minutes. Take up lobster with a skimmer, place in mortar and pound to a pulp. Return to pan, add a pint crushed fresh tomatoes, a half gill white wine, quart broth, two quarts water, four ounces barley, an onion with two cloves stuck in it, two branches parsley, a teaspoon salt, lightly mix and let gently simmer for two hours, frequently mixing meanwhile. Press soup through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into a saucepan, pour in a gill cream, add two saltspoons cayenne, a saltspoon grated nutmeg and a half ounce butter. Mix well and as soon as it comes to a boil pour into a soup tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A lobster bisque thickened with barley rather than rice or roux. The method is sound but the vocabulary and the volumes are Edwardian, and the whole point of the dish is the strained extraction of the shells.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so the wine is 1/4 cup and the cream 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, meaning roughly 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. Four ounces of barley is a scant 2/3 cup of pearl barley by weight.
- The hinge: shell in, shell outThe flavour comes from frying and pounding the shell along with the meat, then extracting it in liquid and straining it all out. Cut the bodies and tails through the shell into small pieces and keep everything in the pan for the full two hours; nothing goes into the finished soup but liquid.
- Pounding without a mortarA food processor handles the pulping, but pulse rather than run it, and expect to work in batches. Shell fragments should be broken up, not powdered into grit that will clog the strainer.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The two-stage straining in the original -- coarse sieve first, fine cone second -- matters here because lobster shell sheds fine splinters. A sieve lined with damp muslin does the same job.
- The headsFilippini discards them. If your lobsters are whole and raw, the green tomalley and any coral are worth scraping out and adding with the cream for colour and depth; the stomach sac behind the eyes is not.
- BrothThe recipe specifies only 'broth'; a light veal or chicken broth suits it. Fish stock works and is more modern, but avoid anything heavily seasoned -- with three quarts of liquid reducing over two hours, a salty commercial stock will finish inedible.
- Simmer and stirBarley settles and scorches, and this pan will be thick well before the two hours are up. Keep it at a bare simmer on a diffuser and stir often, as instructed, or the burnt note will carry through the straining.
- FinishingBring it just to a boil after the cream goes in and serve at once; held at a boil it will separate. Half a teaspoon of cayenne in this volume is assertive but deliberate -- add it in stages if you are unsure.
- YieldAround three quarts before straining, giving eight to ten servings as a first course. Bread croutons, served separately, as the original says.
"Joinville" is one of the fixed garnish names of nineteenth-century French kitchens, generally traced to the Prince de Joinville, a son of Louis-Philippe, and attached to shellfish preparations -- classically a sauce normande enriched with crayfish or shrimp butter and truffle. By the time Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book, such names functioned as shorthand on a menu: a diner reading "Joinville" expected shellfish. What is more telling here is the barley. Cream soups of this period were routinely bound with a starch simmered to collapse and then forced through a sieve, and barley, rice and tapioca each gave a slightly different body -- barley the softest and most faintly nutty. The technique predates the blender, and the labour it assumes, two lobsters pounded in a mortar and the whole soup pressed twice, was the labour of a professional brigade rather than a household cook.