Bisques are great unless you're the crab

Bisques are a traditional French soup of crushed crustaceans with cognac and wine. Although restaurants now serve bisques without these key ingredients, the traditional French approach involves searing the complete crustacean in oil to extract flavor and simmering in fish stock, cognac, white wine and herbal and vegetable aromatics. These flavors are then strained, thickened, seasoned and strained again for a velvety texture.

This all works great unless your crabs are waving at you before you start the searing technique. My crabs appeared to have expired along the one day trip from the coast to the market, but after pouring water over them to clean and remove any female egg sacs, I woke up some survivors whom I could not look in their little periscope eyes. Hypocrite that I am regarding food—I’ll eat it but don’t make me responsible for its life—I asked a workmate to trade live for dead crabs. Having already commented that she preferred life crabs, this was a fair trade—one done without involving chef. Tomorrow we fry beignets of shrimp…please let them already be in shrimp heaven.