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January 3
Menu: Lobster Bisque; Toasted Crackers; Olives Celery Pickles; Roast Pigeons; Sweet Potatoes; Fried Hominy; Lettuce Salad; Cheese Balls; Lemon Meringue Pie Coffee Lobster Bisque-4 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 head celery, 2 lobsters, 1 small onion, 6 whole white peppers, 4 sprigs parsley, 1 quart milk, white pepper to taste. Cover lobsters with boiling water, add salt, celery diced, whole peppers, parsley and onion. Cook until lobsters' claws can easily be pulled apart; it will probably take 25 minutes. When cool enough to handle, cut lobsters down back, remove meat from body and claws. Save coral. Put back all tough parts with small claws and shells, and cook for 20 minutes in same liquor. Liquor must be considerably reduced. Dry coral, rub through sieve. Blend Crisco and flour in saucepan over fire, stir in milk, let this come to boil, add 2 cups of strained lobster broth. Bring to boiling point, season with salt and pepper, and stir in sifted coral enough to give liquid bright pink color. Place lobster meat cut in fine pieces in hot tureen, pour hot mixture over and serve hot.
A straightforward shellfish bisque from the day-by-day menu calendar at the back of the Crisco book; the printed heading belongs to a neighboring item, and what follows is the lobster bisque. A few of its instructions reflect 1913 practice rather than current thinking.
- Cook the lobsters far lessTwenty-five minutes will leave the tail meat fibrous and dry. A 1 to 1 1/4 lb hard-shell lobster is done in 8 to 10 minutes in boiling water, 12 minutes at 1 1/2 lb. The claws-pull-apart test is reliable, but it arrives much sooner than the book suggests.
- The shell stock is the pointReturning the shells, small claws and body to the cooking liquor for 20 minutes and reducing it hard is what makes this a bisque rather than a milk soup. Do not skip it, and do not dilute the 2 cups of strained broth.
- Crisco and substitutionsCrisco is all-vegetable shortening; the 3 tablespoons are simply the fat for the roux. Butter was the traditional fat for a bisque, and the book is presenting its own product as the substitute.
- Coral is not guaranteedCoral is the roe, present only in female lobsters and only in season. If your lobsters yield none, the soup will be pale ivory rather than pink; a spoonful of tomato paste cooked into the roux is a common stand-in for color.
- Drying and sieving the coralSpread the cooked coral on a plate to dry briefly, then press it through a fine sieve so it disperses instead of clotting. Stir it in off the heat at the end; boiling it dulls the color.
- Amounts left vagueLobster size is not given. Two 1 1/4 lb lobsters yield roughly half a pound of meat and plenty of shell for the broth. A "head of celery" means the whole bunch, not a single rib.
- SaltThe tablespoon of salt goes into the lobster water, not the finished soup. Season the bisque separately at the end, after the reduced broth has gone in.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six as a first course or four as a main soup. Warm the tureen as directed; a cold vessel drops the temperature noticeably.
Bisque in French kitchens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant a rich shellfish soup thickened with pounded shells and, later, rice or a flour roux; the name is generally traced to the Bay of Biscay, though the etymology is disputed and unproven. This version, with its milk-and-roux base rather than cream and cognac, is the plainer American household form, and its appearance in the Crisco day-by-day dinner calendar — which grew out of the same promotional literature as The Story of Crisco, though it was published under a separate title — is instructive: the calendar assigns a dish to every day of the year. Procter & Gamble had introduced Crisco in 1911, and the calendar exists to demonstrate that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard across an entire year of respectable cooking, including in a dish whose whole reputation rested on richness.