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Oyster Soup (Quart select oysters cups)
1 quart select oysters. 4 cups scalded milk. 1/4 cup butter. 3/4 teaspoon salt. 1 stalk celery broken in pieces. ⅛ teaspoon pepper. PROCESS: Place oysters in a colander; pour over one cup cold water. Take up each oyster with the fingers to remove bits of shells, reserve the liquor. Heat to boiling point and strain through double cheese cloth, set aside. Scald milk with celery, remove celery and add strained oyster liquor to milk. Plump oysters in their own liquor, take up with a perforated skimmer and lay over butter and seasonings, place in a hot soup tureen. Strain liquor into milk mixture and pour the latter over oysters. Serve at once with crisp, hot oyster crackers.
A classic oyster stew, built on the oyster liquor rather than a roux. The whole dish takes about fifteen minutes and rewards restraint at every stage.
- The hinge: plump, do not boilOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and the mantles firm up — roughly 1 to 2 minutes in the barely simmering liquor. Held longer they tighten into rubber, and no amount of hot milk will soften them again.
- "18 teaspoon pepper"A typesetting artefact for 1/8 teaspoon. The recipe does not say which pepper; white pepper is the choice that keeps the broth pale.
- Scalded milkMilk brought just to the point where it steams and a skin forms at the edge, about 180F. Do not let it boil, and warm the liquor before combining so the acidity and salt do not curdle it. Whole milk is what the book assumes; half milk, half cream gives a richer stew.
- "Select" oystersA size grade, not a quality claim — medium oysters, still sold this way at fish counters and in refrigerated tubs. A quart of shucked oysters with their liquor is what you want; if the tub is short on liquor, top it up with bottled clam juice rather than water.
- Rinsing and strainingThe recipe pours a cup of cold water over the oysters in the colander and then says to reserve the liquor; whether the rinse water is discarded or drained through and kept is not made explicit. Bringing the liquor to a boil and straining it through doubled cheesecloth removes grit and coagulated protein, and the step is worth doing properly — grit is the usual fault in this soup.
- The celeryOne stalk broken up and steeped in the hot milk, then lifted out. It is an infusion, not a vegetable in the finished soup; leaves included add more flavour than the ribs.
- Butter and seasonings in the tureenThe butter is not melted into the pot but laid under the hot oysters so it melts as the milk is poured over. A warmed tureen or warmed bowls matter here, since nothing gets reheated after assembly.
- YieldAbout two quarts, so four to six servings depending on whether it opens a meal or is the meal. Serve immediately; it does not hold or reheat.
Oyster stew of this kind — oysters, milk, butter, pepper and little else — was the American winter standard through the nineteenth century, when Chesapeake and Long Island Sound oysters were shipped inland by rail in barrels and tins and were among the cheapest protein a city household could buy. Oysters were eaten in the months with an R in them, both by custom and because they spawn in warm weather and go thin and milky, and the cold-weather association was reinforced by the long-standing habit of serving oyster stew on Christmas Eve, a practice often traced to Irish Catholic immigrants keeping a meatless vigil. The reliance on the oyster liquor rather than flour or a roux is the mark of the older American style; flour-thickened oyster soups were cooked alongside it, and the crisp oyster cracker — a small, dry, unsweetened biscuit made for exactly this purpose — was the customary accompaniment.