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Oyster Soup (Four dozen oysters)
Four dozen oysters.
Half teaspoonful salt.
One teaspoonful black pepper.
Piece butter size of a large egg.
One pint fresh milk.
One tablespoonful flour.
Put in the liquor to boil; when it comes to a boil add salt, pepper and butter, lastly the flour, after it has been made into a batter. Stir continually. As soon as it begins to boil add yolk of an egg well beaten, then the milk. As soon as the mixture boils up well put in the oysters. Let them remain two minutes. Stir all the time or the milk will curdle.
A shellfish soup built on oyster liquor rather than stock, thickened lightly with flour and enriched with an egg yolk. The two-minute oyster poach is the one instruction in it that modern cooks have not improved on.
- The liquor is the stockFour dozen shucked oysters give roughly two to three cups of liquor, depending on how they were handled. Strain it through a fine sieve or cheesecloth first; shell grit is common and the recipe gives no instruction for removing it.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cookbooks measured butter by comparison to eggs, walnuts and hazelnuts because it came in irregular lumps rather than marked sticks.
- A teaspoon of black pepper is a lotThat much pepper in the finished soup will dominate. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- Making the flour "into a batter"Slake the tablespoon of flour with a few spoonfuls of cold milk or cold liquor to a smooth slurry before it goes in, or it will lump. One tablespoon across this quantity gives only the barest body, which is the point.
- Temper the yolkBeat the yolk with a ladleful of the hot liquor before returning it to the pan, off the heat if you can manage it. Added straight to boiling liquid it will scramble into threads.
- Do not let it boil after the milkDo not let it boil hard after the milk -- The recipe's warning about curdling is real, though the recipe itself directs bringing the mixture back to a boil before the oysters go in, and relies on constant stirring to hold it together. Safer to hold the soup just below a simmer once the milk is in; salty oyster liquor plus a hard boil is what breaks dairy.
- Two minutes is correctThe oysters are done when their edges ruffle and they plump. Longer and they tighten into rubber.
- YieldServes four to six as a first course, three or four as a main. Ladle it out immediately; it does not hold, and it does not reheat without toughening the oysters.
Oyster soups and stews run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks in enormous variety because oysters were then cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel from the Chesapeake and Long Island beds. A household book like this one could assume four dozen oysters was an unremarkable purchase, the way a modern book assumes a can of tomatoes. The technique here is the classic milk-based oyster stew rather than a chowder or a bisque: no vegetables, no aromatics, nothing but the liquor, butter, milk and a thread of flour, so the flavour is almost entirely the oyster's own. Overfishing and pollution of the Atlantic beds through the twentieth century turned that everyday ingredient into a luxury, which is why the quantity in the title reads today as extravagance rather than plain economy.