Lobster Bisque
1/4 cupful Crisco Salt, pepper, red pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste Squares fried bread Thin lemon slices Open a can of lobster of good quality, take out best pieces and cut into small squares without tearing; put them aside. Place remains of lobster in mortar or basin, and pound quite smooth with Crisco. Soak bread in water, adding flour, and seasonings, and put all on fire in soup pot with pounded lobster and Crisco; stir till it boils, and boil for fifteen minutes; then pass it through sieve, add milk and pieces of lobster, and return to the pot till it boils up. Serve with small squares of fried bread, and send thin slices of lemon to table with it. This is an excellent soup , and can of course be made with fresh lobster.
A canned-lobster bisque from the Crisco promotional cookbook, thickened with soaked bread rather than a roux. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — bread, flour and milk are called for in the method but never quantified — so treat the amounts below as working figures.
- What the quantities probably areFor a 6 oz can of lobster, figure 2 thick slices of stale white bread soaked and squeezed, 2 tablespoons flour, and 3 to 4 cups whole milk. The 1/4 cupful of Crisco is the only measured item, and it is generous; 3 tablespoons is plenty.
- The stray line"1/2 cupful barley, pearl" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the section, not to this one. Ignore it.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold today, though the formula has changed since the book was printed. The book pushed it as a butter and lard substitute; butter is the better choice here for flavour in a shellfish soup, in the same quantity.
- Pounding the shell scrapsThe point of pounding the trimmings with fat is to make a lobster butter that carries the flavour into the soup. A food processor does it in seconds. If you are using fresh lobster, pound the shells too, then strain hard — this is where most of the taste comes from.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingBoiling the bread-and-lobster base for a quarter hour is fine, since it is being sieved anyway. What must not boil hard is the finished soup after the milk and reserved lobster meat go in: bring it just to a simmer, or the milk breaks and the lobster squares turn tough.
- Straining"Pass it through sieve" means push it through a fine mesh with a ladle, not merely drain it. Discard whatever fibrous debris stays behind in the sieve.
- Red pepper and nutmegRed pepper is cayenne — a pinch. Grated nutmeg on a cream shellfish soup is standard period seasoning and works; use less than you think.
- Fried breadCut crustless bread into 1/2-inch dice and fry in shortening or butter until golden, then drain. They soften within a minute or two in the bowl, so fry them last and pass them separately.
- YieldAbout four cups of finished soup, or four small first-course servings.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a product nobody had asked for: a shortening made from cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation, introduced in 1911. The recipes are deliberately conventional — this bisque is an ordinary Anglo-American version of a French soup, with Crisco simply dropped into the slot where butter or lard would have gone. Bisque itself is generally traced to the French coastal kitchen, where crustacean shells were pounded and their flavour extracted into a thickened broth; the older English versions, like this one, thicken with soaked bread rather than rice or roux, a technique that goes back well before either. The casual instruction to "open a can of lobster of good quality" is the most dated line on the page: canned lobster was a large North Atlantic industry in the late nineteenth century and a normal pantry item.