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Bisque of Crayfish a L'ancienne

A creamy soup made from crayfish, vegetables, wine, and consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Bisque of Crayfish a L'ancienne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crayfish

  1. Remove the gut from the crayfish by holding it firmly and pinching the end of the tail fin to withdraw the gut.

Make the broth

  1. In a stewpan, combine the carrot, onion, celery, parsley roots, bay leaf, thyme, and mignonette pepper with the butter and fry for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the crayfish and pour in the white wine. Allow to boil.

  3. Add the consommé and let it gently boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Remove the crayfish and strain the broth through a napkin into a basin to extract the essence from the vegetables.

Finish

  1. Pick the shell off 50 of the crayfish tails, trim them neatly, and set aside.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crayfish
Provides the main shellfish flavour and the tail meat that is picked out for garnish.
Butter
Carries the aromatic vegetables' flavour during frying and adds richness to the broth.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the broth as it boils.
Consommé
Forms the liquid base of the bisque, carrying the flavour of the dish.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Frying the aromatics gently in butter draws out their sweetness and builds the flavour base. If they brown too hard, they can taste bitter and dull the delicate broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crayfish, carrot, celery, parsley, thyme, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crayfish, carrot, celery, parsley, thyme, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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