Partan Bree

Partan bree is a traditional creamy crab soup of north-east Scotland, the word 'partan' being the Doric Scots for crab and 'bree' for broth or brew. It belongs to the coastal cookery of Aberdeenshire and the fishing towns of the Moray Firth, where brown and velvet crabs were plentiful in the creel catch and were turned into a rich, sustaining soup that used every part of the animal, the sweet white claw meat and the richer brown meat from the shell. The soup is built on a base of milk and stock, thickened not with flour but with rice, a feature that distinguishes it from the more common flour-thickened cream soups and gives a softer, more substantial texture. Long a fisherman's and farmhouse dish of the north-east, partan bree was served at harvest and at celebrations, and it remains a fixture of Aberdeenshire hotel and restaurant menus, valued as a showcase of the local crab.

A pale, silky, deeply savoury soup with the sweet flavour of fresh crab running through it, a faint richness from the brown meat, the rice having melted to a soft thickness. Eaten hot with brown bread and butter.

Partan bree uses rice instead of flour to thicken, which gives a softer, more glutinous body and a faint sweetness that suits the crab. The crab shells are simmered long in milk and water with aromatic vegetables, onion, carrot, bay, to extract all their flavour into the broth, the liquid strained and the shells discarded. Rice is then cooked in the strained broth until it is completely soft, often broken down further by blending part or all of it for a smooth texture. The white and brown crab meat is folded back in at the end, the brown meat for richness and colour, the white for sweetness and texture, and the soup finished with cream and a squeeze of lemon, seasoned with cayenne or white pepper to lift the sweetness. The rice thickens the soup without the roux step of a classical bisque, making it simpler and more rustic, and the high proportion of crab to liquid is what makes it taste of crab rather than cream.