Home › Soups › Oyster Soup with Milk
Oyster Soup with Milk
Pour one quart cold water over one quart oysters if solid; if not solid, use one pint of water, drain through a colander into the soupkettle, and when it boils skim; add pepper, then the oysters; season with butter and salt, then add one quart rich new milk brought to boiling point in a tin pail set in a pot of boiling water, let boil up and serve at once. Or, instead of adding the milk, place it, boiling hot, in tureen, pour the soup over it and then serve.
A plain nineteenth-century oyster stew that relies on the oyster liquor for its flavour rather than a roux or stock. The technique is sound; only the timings and the dairy handling need translating.
- The hinge: add the oysters lastThe oysters go into liquid that has already boiled and been skimmed, and the pot is brought up only briefly at the end — "let boil up and serve at once." Two to three minutes of oyster cooking, until the edges just ruffle, is as much as they want; longer and they tighten into rubber.
- What "solid" oysters meansShucked oysters were sold either drained ("solid") or swimming in their own liquor, and that appears to be the distinction here. Solid oysters get the full quart of water; oysters packed in liquor get a pint, since the liquor makes up the difference.
- Drain but keep everythingThe water is poured over the oysters to rinse grit and shell fragments loose, then the combined water and liquor is what becomes the soup. The oysters themselves are set aside and returned at the end.
- "Rich new milk"New milk is fresh whole milk, unskimmed, straight from the day's milking — somewhat richer than supermarket whole milk. Use whole milk with a splash of cream, or half milk and half half-and-half.
- The tin pail in boiling waterThis is an improvised double boiler, used because milk scorches over a direct fire. A heatproof bowl over simmering water does the same job; scald the milk to just below a simmer, no more.
- The tureen method is the better onePouring the hot soup over hot milk in the tureen keeps the milk from ever boiling in contact with the liquor, which is where curdling happens. If your oysters are strongly briny, take this option.
- Seasoning orderPepper goes into the liquor before the oysters, salt after — sensible, since oyster liquor is already salty and its strength varies. Salt at the end, to taste.
- YieldSomething like three quarts finished soup on the ingredient volumes given — six to eight servings. Serve immediately; it does not hold or reheat.
Oyster stews of this kind were everyday food across the nineteenth-century United States, not luxury food. Rail and barrel shipment moved Atlantic and Gulf oysters inland in enormous volume, and by the 1870s an Ohio household — Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Minneapolis but grew out of an earlier Ohio volume — could buy shucked oysters by the can or keg through the winter months. That is why a landlocked cookbook can offer several oyster soups in a row, and why the recipe fusses over whether the oysters arrived drained or in liquor: the packing method determined how much water you added. The direction to scald milk in a tin pail set inside a pot of boiling water is a reminder that these cooks worked over a wood range with no low setting, and that milk in an uncooled kitchen might well be ready to curdle at the first hard boil.