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March 16
Menu: Clam Bisque; Crackers; Codfish Balls; Escalloped Tomatoes; Cucumber Salad; Bermuda Onions; Custard Pie; Coffee Clam Bisque-2 cups clams, 2 tablespoons chopped onions, bit of bay leaf, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups chicken stock, 1 teaspoon salt, pepper and red pepper to taste, 1 pint hot cream, and 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce. Chop clams, and cook in stock 20 minutes. Melt Crisco, add onions, cook 5 minutes; add flour, strained clam liquor, cook 5 minutes; add seasonings, cream, and serve.
A 1913 cream soup written in the compressed shorthand of a menu calendar rather than a proper recipe, so a few steps have to be inferred. Read it through before starting.
- The hinge: do not boil after the cream goes inA pint of hot cream is stirred in at the end and the soup is served immediately. Returning it to a boil risks curdling against the salt and the clam liquor.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco is a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, flavourless by design; the book exists to sell it. Three tablespoons of butter make a better roux for a shellfish bisque and cost nothing in texture.
- What two cups of clams meansRoughly a pound of shucked clams, which is about two dozen cherrystones or three to four dozen littlenecks, plus their liquor. Canned chopped clams with their juice work; you will need about three 6.5 oz cans.
- The clams are strained outAs written, the chopped clams simmer in stock for 20 minutes and only the strained liquor goes into the soup. That long simmer would toughen them anyway, so either accept it as a clam-flavoured stock or reserve the solids and return them off the heat at the end, warmed through only.
- Where the bay leaf goesThe recipe lists it but never uses it. Put it in with the clams and stock at the start and remove it before the cream.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chilli flakes. An eighth of a teaspoon is plenty against a pint of cream.
- Missing liquidThe two cups of chicken stock are called for at the start and then only "strained clam liquor" is added to the roux. Add the whole strained quantity, stock and clam juice together; four tablespoons of flour need more than the clam liquor alone before a pint of cream goes in.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving six as a first course. It is rich enough that larger portions are unwelcome.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. The "Calendar of Dinners" section dated each menu to a day of the year, and this one falls on March 17 — a St. Patrick's Day dinner. Bisque itself is older and French, the word generally traced either to the Bay of Biscay or to the notion of a twice-cooked broth; in the classical form it meant a shellfish soup thickened with pounded shells and rice. In American cookery the pounded-shell method was widely replaced by a flour roux and a great deal of cream, and clams, cheap and abundant, took the place of the crayfish and lobster of the French original.