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Oyster Stew (Oysters are stewed with milk)
Oysters are stewed with milk, cream or water. When the liquor of the oysters is used, and this is stewed down considerably, it is called a dry stew. The ordinary stew is made as follows: Pick the oysters out of the juice with a fork, as dry as possible; stew the juice, thickening the milk or water of which the soup is to be made, and let it stand until thoroughly cooled; then drop the oysters in, and just as the cooled soup begins to show signs of simmering, empty out all together, and you will have a rich soup and plump oysters.
V. Boiled Dishes.
Fish Chowder. The ingredients are: Cod, haddock, or any other firm-fleshed fish, and salt pork. Fry three or four slices of salt pork in a deep kettle. When crisp take it out and put into the kettle, first, a layer of sliced potatoes, then one of fish, and then one of onions, alternating with a layer of fish until all is used. Pepper it well, add boiling water enough to cover the whole, and boil half an hour. Put in half a pint of milk, and cook it five minutes longer, gently, to prevent burning. A brass kettle is often used when there is a large party.
Two recipes run together here, both written for cooks who already knew the proportions. Neither gives quantities, so treat them as method rather than formula.
- The hinge: oysters go in last, off the heatThe whole point of the odd-sounding instruction to cool the base is that oysters need about a minute or two of gentle heat to plump and curl. Held at a simmer they tighten into rubber. Bring the liquid to just below a simmer, add the oysters, and pull the pot as soon as the edges ruffle.
- "Thickening the milk or water"The recipe does not say how, but this most likely means a light roux or a flour-and-butter slurry whisked into the dairy, not a thick sauce. A tablespoon each of butter and flour per pint of milk is plenty; the stew should coat a spoon barely if at all.
- Working proportionsFor four servings, allow 1 quart shucked oysters with their liquor, 1 quart milk or half milk and half cream, 3 tablespoons butter, and salt and white pepper. Serve in warmed bowls with oyster crackers.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor almost always carries shell fragments and grit. Pour it through a fine sieve or a doubled cheesecloth before reducing it. A "dry stew" simply means the liquor is boiled down hard so the oyster flavour dominates and little added liquid is used.
- Temperature and raw shellfishBarely-heated oysters are the tradition, but they are not cooked through. Raw and lightly cooked oysters carry a real Vibrio risk, particularly in warm months. Anyone pregnant, elderly, or immunocompromised should have oysters brought fully to temperature or skip the dish.
- Skip the brass kettleUnlined brass reacts with salt and acid to form verdigris, and copper leaches readily into hot food. Warnings about verdigris in unlined brass and copper vessels were common in period cookery writing. Use a heavy stainless or enamelled pot.
- Chowder: half an hour is too longSliced potatoes need 15 to 20 minutes; firm white fish in chunks needs 8 to 10. Simmer the potatoes and onions until nearly tender, then lay the fish on top and cook until it just flakes. Add the milk at the end and heat without boiling.
- Chowder quantitiesThree or four slices of salt pork means roughly 4 oz. For 2 lb of fish, use 1.5 lb potatoes and two medium onions, and season with salt as well as the pepper the recipe emphasises. Scatter the reserved crisp pork over the bowls. Serves four to six.
Oysters were a cheap, everyday food in nineteenth-century America, dredged from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound in enormous quantities and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, which is why a book of general household recipes can assume its readers have a quart on hand and need no instruction on where to get them. Oyster stew — little more than milk, butter and oysters — belonged to church suppers, saloon free lunches and, in many families, Christmas Eve, a custom often traced to Irish Catholic immigrants adapting a meatless vigil meal to what was locally abundant. The chowder that follows shares the same New England kitchen logic of salt pork, potatoes and layered pot cookery; the word itself is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron, carried into the Maritimes and down the coast by fishing communities. By the turn of the century the great oyster beds were already being fished and polluted toward collapse, and the casual abundance these recipes assume was closer to its end than its beginning.