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Oyster Bisque
Boil 1 quart oysters in their own liquor with about 1 pint mildly-flavored white stock. Let boil for 1/2 an hour or even longer. Take up and strain, put back to boil, season with salt and white pepper as needed, add 1 quart rich milk and 1/2 a pint of cream. Blend together 1 tablespoon potato flour with 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, and with this thicken soup till it is smooth and velvety.
A straightforward oyster cream soup, built on the liquor rather than the oysters themselves. Two things drive the result: what you do with the strained solids, and how gently you treat the soup once the dairy goes in.
- The half-hour boil is deliberateOysters cooked this long are finished as eating oysters, but that is the point here — they are being used to extract flavour into the stock and are then strained out. If you want oyster in the bowl, poach a few extra separately for two minutes and drop them in at the end.
- Potato flourThis is potato starch, still sold under both names. It thickens at a lower temperature than wheat flour and thins out again if held at a hard boil, so add it at the end and bring the soup only to a bare simmer afterwards.
- CriscoThe book was published as promotional literature for Crisco, which is why shortening appears where a cook would otherwise reach for butter. A tablespoon of butter does the same job and tastes better in a bisque.
- White stockA light veal or chicken stock, unbrowned and unseasoned. Any mild low-sodium chicken stock works; avoid anything dark or heavily herbed, which will fight the oyster.
- Rich milkPre-homogenisation "rich milk" was closer to today's whole milk with some cream still in it. Whole milk plus the specified half pint of cream is the right reading.
- Guard against curdlingOyster liquor is salty and slightly acidic, and a quart of milk added to a hot salted broth can break. Warm the milk first, add it off the boil, and hold the finished soup below a simmer.
- Seasoning orderSalt after straining, as the recipe says he long boell — the liquor concentrates duringil and can end up salty enough on its own. White pepper was the usual choice in pale soups of this kind, presumably to keep the colour clean.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, depending on how much liquid boils away during the half hour, which is enough for six or so first-course servings.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really advertising: Procter & Gamble issued menu books to teach American cooks to use Crisco, introduced in 1911, in place of butter and lard, and shortening turns up throughout them. Oyster bisque itself long predates that campaign — oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in the late nineteenth century, and cream soups made from their liquor appear across American and British household cookery of the period. The word bisque is generally traced to French shellfish soups thickened with rice or breadcrumbs; by 1900 English-language cookbooks used it loosely for almost any strained, cream-enriched shellfish purée.