Home › Soups › Cream of Shrimps (As made in Nice Boil shell)
Cream of Shrimps (As made in Nice Boil shell)
(As made in Nice.) Boil, shell, clean, and chop fifty shrimps, fry them in 2 ounces of butter, add 1 slice of stale bread, 3 anchovies, 4 ounces of boiled rice, 1 sliced onion, salt, pepper, and 2 quarts of white stock. Cook this 2 hours. Press through a sieve a tablespoonful of sherry or a glass of white wine, and serve hot.
A Provençal shrimp bisque of the older kind: shellfish, rice and stale bread cooked down in stock, then forced through a sieve so the starch and the shrimp itself do the thickening. No cream is involved despite the name.
- Fifty shrimpsMediterranean shrimp of the period were generally small, so fifty is a modest amount rather than a large one; depending on size, expect somewhere between about 8 oz and 1 lb in the shell, and roughly half that peeled. Buy shell-on and keep the shells; the original shells them and does not use the shells again.
- Save the shells for the stockRather than boiling the shrimp in plain water, simmer the shells 20 minutes in the 2 quarts of white stock and strain. This is the hinge of the dish: the sweetness lives in the shells, not the meat.
- Two hours is too longThe shrimp meat is already cooked when it goes in, and two hours of simmering will leave it stringy and give the soup a stale-iodine edge. Forty minutes is enough to soften the rice, bread and onion; add most of the chopped shrimp in the last ten minutes.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, lightly salted. A good low-sodium chicken stock works; avoid anything with browned bones or tomato, which would muddy the colour.
- AnchoviesThree salt-packed anchovies, rinsed and boned, or three oil-packed fillets. They dissolve completely and read as depth rather than fish. Salt the soup only after they have gone in.
- Pressing through a sieveThe intent is a purée: blitz with a stick blender, then push through a fine sieve or chinois with a ladle. The bread and rice give body, so skip any added flour or roux.
- The wineA tablespoon of sherry or a glass of dry white; the recipe does not define the glass, so treat it as a small wineglass. Stir it in off the heat at the end, as the recipe does.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock reduces to roughly 6 to 8 first-course servings. Reheat gently; a puréed rice soup scorches easily on a thin pan bottom.
Nice was Sardinian territory until 1860 and its cooking still reads as Ligurian more than French — anchovy used as seasoning rather than as a fish, rice as a thickener, no cream in a soup called cream of shrimps. Bisques of this type predate the cream-and-butter versions that later took over restaurant menus: the body comes from stale bread and boiled rice pressed through a sieve, a frugal habit found all round the northern Mediterranean where nothing edible was thrown out. The parenthetical attribution to a city fits the habit of these late-Victorian and Edwardian travel cookbooks, which collected dishes as souvenirs, which is why quantities like "fifty shrimps" survive in a form no professional kitchen would have written down.