Crawfish Bisque

Ingredients

• two ounces of butter
• half a bottle of French white wine
• a quart of strong consomme
• twenty-five of the crawfish tails
• three anchovies
• the crusts of French rolls
• a little cayenne pepper
• the juice of half a lemon

Method

1. 1

   Fry butter for ten minutes, add crawfish and wine, boil, then add consomme and boil for half an hour.

2. 2

   Strain broth, pick crawfish tails, and prepare crawfish butter with shells and fresh butter.

3. 3

   Combine remaining crawfish with anchovies and fried roll crusts, pound together, add reserved broth, and strain into a puree.

4. 4

   Mix with crawfish butter, season, and serve hot with crawfish tails.

As published

This recipe was extracted from Bohemian San Francisco (1914) by Clarence E. Edwords, page 48. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

two ounces of butter. Put these ingredients into a stewpan and fry them ten minutes, then throw in the crawfish and pour on them half a bottle of French white wine. Allow this to boil and then add a quart of strong consomme and let all continue boiling for half an hour. Pick out the crawfish and strain the broth through a napkin by pressure into a basin in order to extract all the es- sence from the vegetables. Pick the shells off twenty-five of the crawfish tails, trim them neatly and set them aside until wanted. Reserve some of 89 BOHEMIAN the spawn, also half of the body shells with which to make the crawlish butler to flnish the soup. This butter is made as fol- lows: Place the shells on a baking sheet BISQUE in the oven to dry; let the shells cool and OF then pound them in a mortar with a little CRA>VFISH lobster coral and four ounces of fresh butter, thoroughly bruising the whole to- gether so as to make a fine paste. Put this in a stcwpan and set it over a slow fire to simmer for about five minutes, then rub it through a sieve with considerable pressure into a basin con- taining ice water. As soon as the colored crawfish butter is be- come firmly set, through the coldness of the water, take it out and put it into a small basin and set in the refrigerator until wanted. Reverting to the original recipe: Take the remainder of the crawfish and add thereto three anchovies, washed for the purpose, and also the crusts of French rolls, fried to a light brown color in butter. Pound all these thoroughly together and then put them into a stewpan with the broth that has been re- served in a basin, and having warmed the bisque thus prepared rub it through a sieve into a fine puree. Put this puree into a soup pot and finish by incorporating therewith the crawfish butter and season with a little cayenne pepper and the juice of half a lemon. Pour the bisque quite hot into the tureen in which have been placed the crawfish tails, and send to the table. This is not so difficult as it appears when you are reading it and if you wish to have something extra fine take the necessary time and patience and prepare it. 90 SAN FRANCISCO We cannot dispose of the shell fish of San Francisco without a word or two about clams, for certainly there is no place where they are in greater variety and better flavor. In fact the CLAMS clam is the only bivalve of this part AND of the coast that has a distinctive and ABALONES good flavor. Several varieties are to be found in the markets, the best and rarest being the little rock clams that come from around Drake's Bay, just above the entrance to Golden Gate. These are most delicious in flavor and should never be eaten otherwise than raw. The sand, or hard shell, or as they are some- times called little necks, are next in choiceness, and then come the Pismo beach clams, noted for their flavor and enormous size. The mud clam is good for chowder but not so good as either of the other varieties men- tioned. The Bohemian way to have your clams is to go to the shore of Bolinas Bay or some other equally retired spot, and have a clam bake, or else take a pot along with the other ingredients and have a good clam chow- der. This, however, may be prepared at any time and is always a good meal. Clam fritters when prepared according to the recipe given herein, is one of the best methods of preparing the clam, and it has the peculiarity of being so tasty that one feels that there is never enough cooked. Of all the ways of cooking clams chowder takes precedence as a rule, and it is good when made prop- erly. By that we do not mean the thin, watery stuff that is served in most of the restaurants and called clam chowder just because it happens to be made every Fri- day. That is fairly good as a clam soup but it is no more chowder than a Mexican soup approaches a craw- fish bisq

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.