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Creme, Nantua
Heat one and a half ounces butter in a saucepan, adding one finely sliced carrot, one sliced onion, a sprig thyme, two bay leaves, a half tablespoon whole black peppers and one and a half pounds live lobsters cut in small pieces, gently brown fifteen minutes, then add one pound fresh halibut cut in small pieces. Moisten with quarter pint white wine, one pint crushed tomatoes and two quarts water. Season with two teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding three ounces raw rice, mix well, and slowly cook one hour, stirring at bottom once in a while. Strain through a sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan; add two gills cream, one tablespoon brandy, a half ounce good butter, briskly mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A shellfish bisque in the classic French manner, thickened with rice rather than flour and finished with cream and brandy. The measurements are pre-standardization but all translate cleanly.
- The unitsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is 1 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, giving 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. A quarter pint of wine is 1/2 cup.
- "Chinese strainer"A chinois, the fine conical strainer. The recipe says only "strain," but the first pass through the coarse sieve is where much of the work is done: press the lobster shells, fish and softened rice through with a pestle or the back of a ladle, since a good deal of the body and colour of the soup is carried in that pulp. Simply pouring the liquid off and discarding the solids will give a noticeably thinner soup.
- Live lobsterA pound and a half live weight is one small lobster. Have it split and cut up at the fish counter if you would rather, and keep the tomalley and any coral for the pot; they carry flavour and colour. Frozen raw lobster tails work but give a paler, flatter result.
- The rice is the thickenerThree ounces of raw rice, a scant 1/2 cup of long-grain, breaks down over the hour and gives the soup its body. Do not swap it for flour or cornstarch, and do stir the bottom as instructed, since rice and tomato scorch readily.
- HalibutHalibut is now expensive; any firm white fish with bones and trimmings included will do the same job. The fish is a background flavour and a source of gelatin, not a featured ingredient.
- The finishOnce the cream, brandy and butter go in, bring it just to a boil and stop. Prolonged boiling after the cream can break it and cooks off the brandy that is there for aroma.
- Seasoning orderTwo teaspoons salt is measured against two quarts of water, but roughly half that liquid will have gone by the time you strain. Taste and adjust after the cream, not before.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts finished soup: six to eight first-course servings. It is rich enough that larger portions are unwelcome.
Anything called Nantua in a French kitchen refers to the town of Nantua in the Ain, on the edge of the Jura, whose lake was famous for freshwater crayfish; the classic sauce Nantua is built on crayfish butter and crayfish tails, and the name is often said to have drifted into a looser label for shellfish-enriched cream preparations. American cooks of this period rarely had access to \>, so lobster stands in. The method here is the standard bisque technique of the era: aromatics and shellfish browned in butter, wetted with wine and water, thickened with rice, then forced through a sieve and a chinois so that the shells give up their flavour and are then thrown away. The brandy and the small piece of raw butter added at the end are both textbook Escoffier-era finishing gestures, meant to add perfume and gloss rather than substance.