Crawfish Or Lobster Soup Recipe

Take some middling and small fishes, and put them in a gallon of water,

with pepper, salt, cloves, mace, sweetherbs, and onions; boil them to

pieces, and strain them out of the liquor. Then take a large fish, cut

the flesh off one side, make forcemeat of it, and lay it on the fish;

dredge grated bread in it, and butter a dish well; put it in the oven

and bake it. Then take one hundred crawfish, break the shells of the

tails and claws, take out the meat as whole as you can; pound the shells

and add the spawn of a lobster pounded; put them into the soup, and, if

you like, a little veal gravy; give them a boil or two together. Strain

the liquor off into another saucepan, with the tops of French bread,

dried, beat fine, and sifted. Give it a boil to thicken; then brown some

butter, and put in the tails and claws of the crawfish, and some of the

forcemeat made into balls. Lay the baked fish in the middle of the dish,

pour the soup boiling hot on it; if you like, add yolks of eggs, boiled

hard, pounded, and mixed by degrees with the soup.