Home › Fish, Oysters, Etc › Delmonico's Receipt For Oyster Stew
Delmonico's Receipt For Oyster Stew
Take one quart of liquid oysters; put the liquor (a teacupful for three) in a stewpan; add half as much more water, salt, good bit of pepper, teaspoonful of rolled crackers for each. Put on the stove and let it boil; have your oysters ready in a bowl; the moment it begins to boil, pour in all your oysters-say ten for each person. Now watch carefully. As soon as it begins to boil, take out your watch, count just thirty seconds; take your oysters from the stove; have a large dish ready with one and a half tablespoons of cold milk for each person; pour your stew on this milk and serve immediately. Never boil an oyster in milk.
A precise, fast recipe whose whole point is restraint: the oysters barely cook, and the milk is never heated at all. Read the timing instruction before you start.
- The hinge: thirty secondsOnce the oysters go into the boiling liquor, they need only long enough for the edges to ruffle. Thirty seconds from the return to a boil is right; a minute or two past that and they tighten into rubber.
- Never boil an oyster in milkThe closing line is the second half of the technique. Boiled milk with oyster liquor and salt tends to curdle and take on a scalded taste, so the hot stew is poured over cold milk in the serving dish instead, which brings the whole thing to eating temperature at once.
- "Liquid oysters"Shucked oysters sold in their own liquor, sold today as a pint or quart container of shucked oysters. A quart is roughly 25 to 40 medium oysters, which fits the recipe's ten per person for three or four.
- A teacupfulAn unstandardised measure, reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 ounces; call it half to three quarters of a cup of oyster liquor for three people, plus half again as much water. If your container is short on liquor, top it up with water rather than stock.
- Rolled crackersCrushed soda or oyster crackers, rolled fine with a pin. A teaspoon per person is a thickener, not a garnish; it gives the broth body without flour. Serve whole crackers alongside if you want them.
- Cold milkWhole milk. A tablespoon and a half per person is a small amount by modern oyster-stew standards, which lean heavily on cream; this version stays a broth. Measure it into a warmed tureen so the stew does not go cold.
- Seasoning"Good bit of pepper" means more than a pinch, and freshly ground black or white pepper suits it. Salt cautiously: oyster liquor is already saline.
- Yield and servingAs written, three to four servings. Have bowls, milk and crackers all on the counter before the pan goes on the heat, since the whole cooking window is under a minute.
Oyster stew was standard American cooking through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by barrel and rail; recipes for it appear widely in household manuals of the period. The attribution to Delmonico's, the New York restaurant that dominated fine dining from the 1830s into the early twentieth century, is the kind of borrowed prestige compilers of home cookbooks liked to include, and such "receipts" often circulated in newspapers and books without any confirmation that the kitchen in question had supplied them. What makes this version worth keeping is that it reads like something written down by a cook rather than a copyist: the instruction to take out your watch and count, and the flat prohibition on boiling oysters in milk, are both still sound advice.