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Cream of Shrimps (As made in Paris Parboil shell)
(As made in Paris.) Parboil, shell, clean, and chop fifty fine shrimps, fry in 2 ounces of butter, add 1 cup of bread-crumbs of stale bread, not the crust, salt and pepper, 2 quarts of fish stock or that made of chicken or veal, 1 clove, 1 onion, sliced. Save six of the shrimps to add, cut into dice, before serving. Cook 2 hours, press through a sieve, add 1 cup of boiling cream, a little nutmeg, and the shrimps and 2 tablespoonfuls of sherry.
LOBSTER SOUP. (As made in Nantes, France.) Cook 1 ounce of chopped ham, 1 onion, and 1 carrot, cut fine, parsley, thyme, and a bayleaf, in 1 ounce of butter. Add 3 pounds of lobster meat, cooked and cut into dice, 1 pint of white wine, and 1 1/2 quarts of veal stock. Simmer 1 hour. Strain the soup, add 2 cups of boiled rice and 1 hard-boiled egg sliced and some butter. Season and serve with croutons.
Two French shellfish soups run together on one page. Both are built the old way: shellfish simmered into a stock, thickened with bread or rice rather than roux, and finished with cream or wine.
- Fifty shrimps is about a poundFifty shrimps is not a large quantity by weight -- the "fine shrimps" of the original were not jumbo prawns. Buy about a pound of shell-on shrimp of any size, peel and chop them.
- Do not throw the shells awayThe recipe assumes you already have 2 quarts of fish stock. If you do not, simmer the parboiling water with the shells, the onion and the clove for 30 minutes and use that — it is where most of the flavour of the finished soup lives.
- Two hours is for the stock, not the shrimpEverything simmered for those two hours is going through a sieve, so texture is irrelevant. The six reserved shrimp go in at the very end and need only a minute or two in the hot soup; longer and they turn to rubber.
- Bread-crumbs as thickenerOne cup of stale crumb, no crust, is the entire body of the soup. Crusts would darken it, which may be why the original specifies crumb only. Modern soft supermarket bread dissolves to paste -- dry it in a low oven first.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or food mill first, then a fine sieve, gets you where a nineteenth-century cook got with a wooden spoon and patience. Push hard; the residue should be nearly dry.
- Finish off the heatAdd the boiling cream, nutmeg and sherry with the pan off the flame and do not let it boil again. Sherry boiled in a cream soup loses its point, and the cream can break.
- The lobster soup wants a great deal of lobsterThree pounds of picked meat means somewhere in the region of 12 to 15 lb of live lobster, which makes little sense in a modern kitchen. Scaling the whole recipe down by half or two-thirds is the sane approach.
- Rice goes in after strainingIn the lobster soup the aromatics and lobster are strained out, then boiled rice, sliced egg and butter are added back to the broth. It is a garnished consommé rather than a purée — do not blend it.
- YieldThe shrimp soup makes something in the region of 2 quarts after two hours' simmering, six to eight first-course servings. The lobster soup as written serves a similar number.
Both dishes belong to the family of French shellfish soups called bisques, which in their older form were thickened with bread or rice rather than with flour and butter. The technique of pounding the cooked shellfish and forcing it through a sieve is what the modern blender bisque replaces, and bread-crumb binding survives in Mediterranean sauces such as romesco and in Spanish almond soups. Books of this kind sold on the promise that an American housekeeper could reproduce what she had eaten abroad, and the parenthetical "as made in Paris" or "as made in Nantes" was part of that promise -- a claim of authenticity rather than a documented provenance.