Crawfish Bisque
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Archive recipe
Crawfish tails and a deeply flavored shell broth, traditionally served with stuffed crawfish heads.
A labor-intensive recipe from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book (1910), preserved by Open Recipe Archive. The historical method stuffs crawfish heads; this adapted method keeps the stuffing as optional because whole crawfish heads are difficult to source.
The dish
3 of 10 items checked
archive.org
3 of 10 items checked · 7 aisles
Boil the crawfish and reserve the cooking water. Pick the tails and set aside the largest heads if making the traditional stuffing.
Simmer the remaining crawfish, shells, vegetables, herbs, and rice in the cooking water until the broth is richly flavored and the rice is very soft.
Strain the broth, pressing the solids to extract their flavor. Return the liquid to the pot.
Cook the chopped onion in butter, then stir in the crawfish meat and seasonings. Add this mixture to the broth and simmer until hot.
Serve hot with toast. The original cookbook also describes stuffing reserved crawfish heads and baking them before serving in the soup.
Adapted from Open Recipe Archive · The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book (1910; archive record marked public domain). View a published recipe at Internet Archive (opens in a new tab)
Appears in: The Louisiana Creole table