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A Good Oyster Soup
To every four dozen oysters, freshly opened, allow one quarter of a pound of butter, six ounces of flour, two quarts of veal or chicken soup, a quart of milk and seasoning, including a tablespoonful of anchovy sauce, more or less, to suit the taste. Put the butter in a stew-pan, and, when fully melted, add the flour and stir until smooth. Then add the liquor from the oysters that have been just blanched in their liquor, but not boiled, and pour in the soup. Season with a little cayenne and a blade of mace, with black pepper and salt. When all is well mixed, strain and boil ten minutes. Put the oysters that have been blanched and a gill of cream into a tureen, pour the boiling soup over them and serve immediately.
A late-Victorian oyster soup built on a heavy roux and finished off the heat, which is the whole point of the method. A few of its measures and one omission need attention before you start.
- The hinge: the oysters never boilThey are blanched briefly in their own liquor, set in the tureen, and cooked the rest of the way by the boiling soup poured over them. Oysters held at a simmer for even a few minutes tighten into rubber, so the tureen step is not ceremony, it is the cooking.
- Four dozen oystersFour dozen shucked oysters, depending on size, comes to something over a quart of meats plus their liquor. Supplement with bottled clam juice if the oysters come dry.
- A gillA quarter of a pint, half a cup. It goes into the tureen with the oysters rather than into the pan.
- Where the milk goesThe quart of milk is listed among the ingredients but never named again in the method. Add it with the stock, before the ten-minute boil and the straining, and treat the finished quantity accordingly.
- The roux is flour-heavySix ounces of flour to four ounces of butter is more flour than fat. It will produce a distinctly thick soup; three to four ounces of flour gives a texture closer to modern expectations without changing anything else.
- Veal or chicken soupThis means stock or broth, not tinned soup. Season at the end: the oyster liquor, the anchovy sauce and the stock all carry salt.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled condiment of the period, closest today to Worcestershire without the sweetness. A teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a little stock, or a splash of colatura, does the same job.
- A blade of maceOne whole piece of the lacy aril from nutmeg, added to infuse and removed when the soup is strained. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace is the substitute; it will not strain out, so use it sparingly.
- YieldUpwards of four quarts once the milk, cream and oysters are counted in, so a first course for a dozen or more.
- Barely cooked shellfishOysters warmed only by hot soup poured over them are not brought to a sustained safe temperature. Healthy eaters have long accepted this; anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised should not.
Oyster soups and stews fill the soup chapter of nearly every American cookbook from the 1870s through the 1910s, because oysters were then cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans. Chesapeake and Long Island Sound beds supplied a national appetite that later overharvesting and pollution destroyed, which is why a recipe casually calling for four dozen oysters reads as extravagant now and read as everyday then. The construction here is closer to French practice than to the plainer American oyster stew of milk, butter and oysters alone: a blond roux let down with veal stock, seasoned with mace and cayenne, strained smooth, and pointed up with anchovy sauce, one of the bottled fish condiments of the English store-sauce tradition, which Victorian cooks used somewhat as a modern kitchen uses fish sauce. Finishing in the tureen, with cream and oysters waiting for the boiling liquid, was a common way of serving shellfish soup without overcooking it.