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Plain Oyster Soup
Take one quart of oysters to one quart of milk. Boil the milk and liquor from the oysters together. When it has fairly boiled, add a tablespoonful of butter and let it boil up again, using powdered crackers or flour to thicken while boiling. Put in the oysters and serve immediately. The butter is often, and, we think, preferably, added with the seasoning of pepper and salt, for butter when boiled loses its fresh and pleasant flavor.
A late-Victorian oyster stew in its simplest form: oyster liquor, milk, butter, a little thickening. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and the only real skill is knowing when to stop.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersThey go in at the end and are served immediately, exactly as written. Thirty seconds to two minutes, until the edges just ruffle, is enough; longer and they tighten into rubber and shed water into the soup.
- A quart of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, sold by liquid measure in the period. Roughly two pint tubs of shucked oysters, or about three to four dozen medium oysters shucked over a bowl to catch the juice. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve to catch shell grit.
- Don't boil the milk hardWhatever the reason the original calls for boiling, milk holds better if you bring it just to a shiver below the boil. Oyster liquor is briny and a hard rolling boil can encourage curdling.
- Powdered crackersCommon crackers or water biscuits, crushed fine — about 1/3 cup of cracker crumbs, or 2 tablespoons flour, for the quart of milk plus the oyster liquor. Saltines work. Add gradually; the soup should stay pourable, not gluey.
- Take the butter adviceThe closing note is sound and worth following: whisk the tablespoonful of butter in off the heat with the pepper and salt. Boiled butter tastes flat and separates into an oily film.
- SeasoningSalt cautiously — oyster liquor is already saline. White or black pepper both suit it; some period American oyster dishes take a dash of mace.
- YieldA quart of milk with the oyster liquor and the oysters serves about four as a first course, two or three as a supper dish. Serve very hot, in warmed bowls, with more crackers.
Oyster soup and oyster stew were everyday food in nineteenth-century America, not luxuries: the beds of Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound and the Gulf were so productive that shucked oysters travelled inland by barrel and, later, by refrigerated rail, and cheap oyster saloons were fixtures of northern cities. That abundance is why a general-purpose household book like this one can print the recipe with no fuss at all — the assumption is that the reader buys oysters by the quart and knows what to do with them. The aside about butter losing its flavour when boiled is a small piece of period cooking wisdom that has held up, and the recipe's whole structure — milk, liquor, thickening, oysters last — survives essentially unchanged in the oyster stew still eaten on the American East Coast at Christmas and Thanksgiving, a custom often traced to Irish Catholic immigrants substituting cheap oysters for the ling of a traditional fasting supper.