by Julia Child
SOUPE À LA VICTORINE
[Purée of White Bean Soup, Eggplant and Tomato Garnish]
This meal-in-itself will fill up the family on a cold day, especially if you include pork or sausage with the beans. The eggplant and tomato garnish makes a lively and unusual touch to an otherwise traditional bean purée.
For about 8 cups, serving 4 to 6
1) Soaking the beans—1 hour
1 quart of water
A 3-quart saucepan with cover
⅓ cup dry white beans, such as Great Northern or Small White
Bring the water to a rapid boil, drop in the beans, and bring water rapidly back to the boil again; boil uncovered for exactly 2 minutes. Remove from heat, cover pan, and let soak for exactly 1 hour. Meanwhile, you may prepare all the rest of the ingredients for the soup.
2) The soup base—1½ hours of simmering
2 cups combination of sliced leeks and onions, or onions only
3 Tb olive oil or butter
An 8-inch enameled, stainless, or no-stick frying pan
2 bay leaves
½ teaspoon thyme
½ teaspoon sage
Optional: ½ lb. lean side pork (fresh unsmoked bacon), or fresh fat-and-lean pork butt (shoulder), or Italian or Polish sausage
1½ tsp salt
⅛ tsp peppercorns
A food mill or an electric blender
Cook the leeks and onions slowly in the oil or butter until tender and translucent; raise heat slightly and cook for a few minutes more until very lightly browned. As soon as the beans have had their 1-hour soak, scrape the vegetables into them, and add the rest of the ingredients for the soup base (if using sausage rather than pork, add only for last 30–40 minutes of cooking). Bring to the simmer, partially cover the pan, and cook slowly for about 1½ hours or until beans are tender. Set pork or sausage aside for final step, purée the soup, and return to the pan.
(*) May be prepared ahead; set aside uncovered until cool.
3) The eggplant and tomato garnish
A firm, shiny, 1-lb. eggplant (about 8 inches long and 3½ inches at widest diameter)
A 2-quart glazed or stainless mixing bowl
1½ tsp salt
1 lb. fresh, firm, ripe, red tomatoes (3 medium), peeled, seeded, and juiced
2–3 Tb olive oil
The 8-inch frying pan again
4 large cloves garlic, minced or mashed
A cover for the frying pan
Peel the eggplant and cut into ½-inch dice. Toss in the bowl with the salt and let stand at least 20 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the tomatoes and cut pulp into ½-inch squares; strain and reserve juice. When eggplant has stood its 20 minutes, drain and dry on paper towels. Heat the oil in the pan and sauté the eggplant, tossing it, to brown very lightly. Then toss with the tomato pulp and garlic, add the juice from the tomatoes, and cover the pan. Simmer slowly for 10 to 15 minutes until eggplant is tender but still holds its shape. Set aside.
(*) May be prepared ahead; let cool uncovered.
4) Finishing the soup
2 to 3 cups chicken stock or canned broth
3 Tb minced fresh green herbs: basil, parsley, and chives (or parsley only and dried basil or oregano to taste)
About 15 minutes before serving, bring the soup base to the simmer and thin out to desired consistency with chicken stock or broth. Cut the pork or sausage into slices ⅜ inch thick and add to the soup along with the eggplant and tomato. Simmer 3 to 4 minutes to blend flavors. Carefully correct seasoning, stir in the herbs, and serve.
VARIATION
Fennel and Tomato Garnish
Sliced fresh fennel cooked until just tender and then simmered for a moment with diced tomatoes and herbs makes an attractive alternate to the eggplant. Soak the beans and simmer the soup base as described in the preceding recipe; prepare the garnish as follows.
2 cups thinly sliced fresh fennel bulbs
2 Tb olive oil or butter
¼ cup minced shallots or scallions
2 large cloves garlic, minced or mashed
1 lb. tomatoes, peeled, seeded, juiced, and diced
Salt and pepper
Cook the fennel slowly in the oil or butter in a covered skillet for 8 to 10 minutes, or until just tender but not browned. Add the shallots or scallions, garlic, and tomatoes; toss with fennel, cover skillet and cook for a few minutes until tomatoes have rendered the rest of their juice. Uncover, raise heat slightly and cook for a few minutes more to evaporate the juice. Season to taste. Set aside until you are ready to serve, then add to the soup as directed in the Master Recipe, Step 4.
LE POTIRON TOUT ROND
[Pumpkin Soup Baked in a Pumpkin]
This amusing presentation may be prepared either as a soup or a vegetable; the recipe is among the squashes in the Vegetables Chapter.
SHELLFISH SOUPS
Bisques
A bisque is a rich, thick, highly seasoned soup of puréed shellfish. Undoubtedly the bisque came into being because it is an easy as well as elegant way to eat small crustaceans with complicated constructions like crayfish and crabs, and it is a wonderful solution for the chests and legs of lobsters.
This is the kind of recipe to pick for a group of friends who enjoy cooking together, since a bisque is not tricky to make—it just takes a long time. To get the true flavor, the raw shellfish are cut up and sautéed in their shells before being simmered with wine and aromatic ingredients. The meat is then removed from the shells; some of it is saved for a garnish while the rest is puréed. Finally, to extract every remaining bit of flavor and color from the shells, they are puréed with butter, and everything is combined into a splendid soup.
We shall begin with illustrated directions on how to cut up lobsters and crabs, and follow with lobster bisque and its other shellfish variations.
BUYING LOBSTERS
A live lobster should be lively: it spreads its claws, arches its back, and flaps its tail noisily against the underside of its chest when you pick it up. To do so you must grab it with your thumb and index finger at its shoulder just behind the claw joints. You can keep live lobsters in the refrigerator at around 37 degrees for a day or two in a heavy paper bag pierced with air holes, but you should cook them as soon as possible.
When you are picking store-bought boiled lobsters, look closely at their tails, which should curl up against the underside of the chests and spring back into place when straightened. A limp tail indicates that the lobster was moribund before cooking. Be sure also, in buying boiled lobster, that it smells absolutely sweet and fresh. Freshly boiled, cooled, and wrapped lobsters will keep for 2 to 3 days in the refrigerator at around 37 degrees. You may even wrap airtight and freeze a boiled lobster in its shell for several weeks.
To tell the sex of a lobster, look at the last pair of swimmerets on the underside, where chest meets tail. If they are soft and hairy, the lobster is female; if they are hard, pointed, and hairless, the lobster is male.
ON DEALING WITH LIVE LOBSTERS
A number of the best French lobster recipes, including homard à l’américaine and bisque de homard, call for the sautéing of cut-up raw lobster. This means you must buy live lobster and either have it cut up for you and cook it immediately, or do the cutting yourself. The serious cook really must face up to the task personally. While professionals simply cut up the lobsters with never a qualm nor a preliminary, you may find this difficult. If so, we suggest that you plunge them two at a time, head first and upside down, into boiling water; leave for about a minute, until lobsters are limp, and immediately remove them. Because the nervous and circulatory systems of the lobster center in the head area, a head-first plunge into boiling liquid not only kills the lobster almost instantly, but also eliminates muscle spasms. There is a misguided notion that lobsters suffer less if set to boil in cold water; far from being a humane procedure, this is slow death by drowning!
HOW TO CUT UP RAW LOBSTER
Furnish yourself with sharp-pointed lobster scisso
rs or kitchen scissors, a large knife, a cutting board with groove to catch juices or a board set on a tray, a bowl to pour juices into, and another bowl for the lobster tomalley. You now want to split the lobster in two, lengthwise, as follows. Turn the lobster top side up. With scissors, cut through center of shell from end of tail up to but not through eyes in center of head. Turn lobster over and again with scissors cut through shell from end of tail to within ½ inch of tip of head. Then with your knife cut completely through the under side of the lobster lengthwise, following scissor cuts, from ½ inch below tip of head down through tail, thus splitting lobster neatly in two except at the head. Finally grasp lobster in both hands where claw joints meet chest, and break the shell apart at the head to open it up.
Nestled in the head on one side of the lobster or the other is a pouch an inch long and ¾ inch in diameter which is the stomach sack. Locate the sack with your fingers, twist it out, and discard it. (If you have cut sack in two while splitting the lobster, no harm is done; remove the 2 halves.) Pull out and discard the intestinal vein, a thin, flexible translucent or blackish tube that runs from the area of the stomach sack down through the tail meat. The greenish, and sometimes almost blackish, soft matter lying in the chest cavity is the tomalley; scoop it out into a small bowl. If your lobster is female, there will usually be some orange-red roe as well; add this to the tomalley.
With a knife or scissors, separate the two tail sections from the chests. Cut the legs and the claw joints from the chests, and cut claws from end of joints. Crack claws in one or two places with a sharp whack of the knife. Drain juices into a bowl and reserve them, along with the tomalley. The lobster is now ready for sautéing.
HOW TO REMOVE THE MEAT FROM COOKED LOBSTERS
Split and open boiled lobster exactly as described in the preceding directions for raw lobster. Discard stomach sack and intestinal vein. Scoop tomalley from inside the chest sections into a bowl. After lifting meat out of tail sections, you want to remove meat from claws, claw joints, chest sections, and legs. With scissors, cut the claw joints from the chests, and separate each claw from its joint. Cut through shell on each side of joints, lift off shell, and remove meat.
The first step in removing the meat from the claws is to bend the small, hinged half rather slowly but firmly back on itself, toward the bottom of the claw; this will withdraw its cartilage from inside the meat of the main half of the claw. Dig the point of meat out of this small shell with a nut pick or the point of your scissors.
Again with scissors, cut a window out of the main claw shell and remove the whole piece of claw meat with your fingers.
Pull chest section from its outside shell. Note that there are spongy, hairy strips attached to outside side of chest at leg joints; these are gills. Pull off and discard them. Scrape out and add to the tomalley any coagulated white matter clinging to the inside of the shell.
Cut or twist off legs where they join the chest. Dig out meat from inside side of chest, going in between cartilaginous interstices with the point of a knife. This is never a fast operation, but the small amount of meat you extract is the sweetest and tenderest of all.
To remove the meat from the legs, sever them at each of their joints. Place on a board and squeeze the meat out of each piece by rolling a pin (pestle or broom handle) over it. You will not get much, but again the meat is sweet, tender, and worth the time spent on extraction.
CRABS
HOW TO CLEAN AND CUT UP RAW CRABS FOR CRAB BISQUE
Stone crabs, rock crabs, sand crabs, blue crabs, and their ilk and size are especially good for bisques because they are otherwise somewhat complicated to eat. If you are at the seashore you can gather them yourself, or ask lobstermen please not to throw them out, as they often do, but to save all crabs for you. However you obtain them, they must be alive. Just before you are ready to clean and cut them, place them upside down in a large bowl or stoppered sink and cover with very hot water. As soon as air bubbles cease to rise, in a minute or two, the crabs will be limp and ready to work on. Your object in cleaning and cutting is to remove the main body, or chest-leg-claw portions of each crab, from the hard shell, called the carapace, and to collect the tomalley, which is the creamy substance in the chest cavity and carapace.
Turn crabs upside down. Note that female crabs have a wider tail flap than male crabs and the female’s is usually edged with hair.
Lift point of flap away from chest, then grasp flap close to the body of the crab and with a rather slow twisting movement, pull it horizontally free from the end of the crab. The intestinal vein should draw out of the body at the same time.
Break off claw-joint sections where they join the body. To remove the leg-chest section, hold carapace firmly in your left hand and grasp all the legs close to the body in your right hand. Rock leg-chest portion back and forth and it will come loose from the carapace; pull it free. Both chest and interior of carapace should smell fresh and appetizing; your nose is the best judge.
On either side of the chest, where it fitted into the shell, are feathery, spongy strips, which are the gills; pull off and discard them. Scrape the creamy tomalley out of the chest with your fingers and a spoon handle; place in a sieve set over a bowl.
With a vegetable brush, scrub shell on underside of chest and around the legs under a stream of cold water; scrub the claw-joint pieces also. Finally cut the chest in half lengthwise as shown. (Trim off any mossy bits of shell with a knife or scissors.)
You now have prepared for cooking the chest-leg sections, which are cut in two, and the claw-joint sections. The other edible portion of the crab is the rest of the tomalley, which is in the carapace.
Crab tomalley
The greenish, brownish, and sometimes orange creamy matter left in the carapace is also called tomalley. It, along with the juices in the shell, constitutes some of the best parts of the crab.* Pour the juices through the sieve containing the chest tomalley; scoop soft matter out of the shell with your fingers, and into the sieve. When all the crabs are done, pour accumulated liquid into a separate container and reserve. Rub the tomalley through the sieve with a wooden spoon, scrape it off bottom of sieve into a bowl; reserve for Step 7, where it will simmer with the crab-meat garnish. (After puréeing, the raw tomalley will become a rather dark green, which then becomes dark red when cooked.)
* When a whole crab is boiled, the tomalley turns greenish and orange while the liquid usually becomes white.
HOW TO REMOVE THE MEAT FROM COOKED CRABS
Provide yourself with a board and wooden mallet or wooden object of some sort for cracking the shells, and a grapefruit knife for extracting the meat. For a bisque made from small crabs, do not bother to delve too thoroughly because it will take all day; remove only what meat you easily can, and the shell debris will be simmered again anyway to extract all remaining flavor. Begin by twisting the legs from the chest sections, then break each leg off at the knee by bending it back upon itself at the joint, thus drawing the cartilage out of the upper leg meat. For a bisque, chop lower legs into quarter-inch pieces, and reserve for shellfish butter; otherwise discard them. To remove meat from upper legs, as well as from claws and joints, crack shell sharply but lightly with mallet, being careful not to shatter the shell into the meat. Then dig out what meat you easily can with the point of your grapefruit knife. To remove meat from chests, dig out what you can from the holes left by the legs, then from the other side, being careful not to include bits of shell or cartilage. You will get about 1 solid cup of meat from 6 to 8 crabs measuring 3 to 4 inches across the back of the shell.
BISQUE DE HOMARD À L’AMÉRICAINE
[Lobster Bisque]
Considering the price of lobsters and the puréed nature of a bisque, we think it is a waste to use whole lobster here. We therefore suggest only the chests and the legs for the bisque, and the tails, claws, and tomalley for a splendid main dish, such as the homard à l’Américaine described in Volume I on page 223. In fact, you could well combine the two, starting
them out together, since both follow much the same pattern. Serve the main dish one night, and the bisque a day or two later. That is up to you, however, and we shall content ourselves with the chests and legs from 3 or 4 lobsters for the following recipe. As in most dishes of this type, you can expand or contract the ingredients to a certain extent without upsetting the balance of tastes, and you need not be disturbed if you have a little more or a little less of anything that is called for.
A NOTE ON TECHNIQUES AND EQUIPMENT
In the old days you would have needed an 8-quart marble mortar, a large wooden pestle, a 12-inch tamis sieve, a tortoise-shell scraper, and either a flock of kitchen minions or the strength of a Japanese wrestler to produce a proper bisque. Today’s electric blender eliminates these colorful requirements, but there are still multiple simmerings, strainings, and puréeings, as well as numerous bowls, sieves, and spoons that you will need. Do not wash anything off until the soup is done because you will be using the same utensils repeatedly and you don’t want any marvelous tidbits of flavor losing themselves down the drain.