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OYSTERS, SOUP OF (another way)
Open and beard two dozen oysters, cut them into halves, and put them into a soup tureen. Boil the beards in a quart of mutton broth for a few minutes, then strain them, throw them aside, and thicken the soup with three dessert-spoonfuls of arrowroot. Make it quite smooth, and boil it quickly for a quarter of an hour. Strain it through a hair-sieve, add the oyster liquor, a little salt, a pinch of cayenne, and a quarter of a pint of milk, and simmer gently for five minutes. Pour the soup upon the oysters in the tureen, and serve very hot. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian oyster soup that gets its body from arrowroot rather than a roux, and its flavour from the oyster beards steeped in mutton broth. Two instructions in the original work against modern practice and are worth reversing.
- Do not boil the arrowroot for fifteen minutesArrowroot thickens at around 170F and breaks down with prolonged heat, turning a thickened liquid thin and slack again. Stir the slaked arrowroot into the hot broth, bring it just to a simmer until it clears and coats the spoon, then stop — a minute or two at most.
- The oysters are barely cookedThe whole point of pouring the soup over the oysters in the tureen is that they warm through rather than cook; a minute in near-boiling liquid is enough to firm the edges. Oysters simmered any longer shrink and go rubbery. Anyone who should avoid raw or lightly cooked shellfish — pregnancy, liver disease, compromised immunity — should not eat this soup, since the oysters never reach a safe internal temperature.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilled gill around the edge of the oyster. Trim it away with scissors, keep it for the broth as directed, and reserve every drop of the liquor from the shells — it carries most of the salinity, which is why the recipe adds only "a little salt."
- Imperial measuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz or about 4 3/4 US cups. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, a gill, or about 2/3 US cup of milk. Three dessert-spoonfuls is roughly two tablespoons of arrowroot.
- Mutton brothMutton is the meat of an older sheep (in Britain usually over two years; the one-to-two-year stage is hogget), and is hard to find outside halal and Caribbean butchers. A light lamb stock works, or use a clean unsalted chicken stock if you want the oysters to lead rather than the meat.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair; it is often said that metal mesh could taint delicate white sauces, though hair sieves also long predated cheap fine wire mesh. Any fine nylon or stainless sieve does the job now; line it with muslin if you want a very clear soup.
- ServingWarm the tureen and the bowls thoroughly — the recipe relies on retained heat to finish the oysters, and a cold tureen will leave them cold and slippery. Serves five or six as a first course.
- That price3s. 6d. is the cost to the Victorian household, not a modern guide. Two dozen oysters is now the expensive part of the dish by a wide margin.
Cassell's dictionary carries several oyster soups because oysters were, for much of the nineteenth century, cheap enough in Britain to be treated as a bulking ingredient rather than a luxury: the great Essex and Kent beds, Whitstable among them, supplied London in enormous quantities, and overfishing, pollution and disease later in the century pushed prices up. What marks this version out is the arrowroot. Extracted from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported chiefly from the West Indies, it was prized in Victorian kitchens as an invalid food and as a thickener that set clear and tasteless where flour set cloudy and pasty — exactly what a pale oyster soup wanted. The use of mutton broth under shellfish looks odd now but was not remarkable then, and the beards, otherwise discarded, were simmered in it to draw out the last of their sea flavour.