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Oysters, Soup of, Economical
Cut half the meat from a scalded ox-heel into neat pieces about the size of a small oyster. Put them into a stewpan with three pints of good stock, thickened with a little flour and butter. Add a pinch of cayenne and a glassful of sherry, and boil gently for two hours, then put in a dozen and a half of bearded oysters and their liquid, simmer five minutes longer, and serve. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons. (See also PRINCIPLES OF COOKERY--SOUP.)
An economical oyster soup that stretches eighteen oysters across six people by cutting gelatinous ox-heel meat into oyster-sized pieces. The technique is sound; only the oyster timing and a few of the units need translating.
- The hinge: the oysters go in last and barely cookFive minutes at a simmer already firms oysters toward rubber. Drop them in off the heat or at the barest tremble for a minute or two, just until the edges ruffle, and serve immediately.
- Ox-heelCow heel or calf's foot, sold split by halal, Caribbean and some Chinese butchers, occasionally as "cow foot." "Scalded" means blanched and cleaned; ask the butcher to split and clean it. Two hours of gentle boiling is right for the collagen, which is what gives this soup its body.
- Bearded oystersThe "beard" is the frill of gill tissue at the edge. Shuck over a bowl to catch every drop of liquor, strain it through muslin for grit, and add it with the oysters rather than early.
- A glassful of sherryThe recipe does not specify the glass; read as a Victorian wineglassful this is roughly 2 fl oz, about 1/4 cup. A dry amontillado or fino suits the dish better than a cream sherry.
- Three pintsImperial pints, so 60 imperial fl oz, a little under 8 US cups. "Good stock" here means a real veal or beef stock, not a cube; the ox-heel adds body but not much flavour.
- Thickened with flour and butterEqual weights kneaded raw into a beurre manie and whisked in, or cooked as a light roux first. Around 1 oz of each to three pints gives a soup that coats a spoon without becoming a sauce.
- CayenneA pinch means a pinch. The pepper is there to lift the oyster liquor, not to register as heat.
- Yield and costFive or six as a first course, as the recipe states. The 3s is late-Victorian money; the figure covers the whole potful, so it will not tell you how the cost divided between oysters, stock and heel.
Cassell's belonged to an era when oysters were still working-class food in Britain — dredged in quantity from the Thames estuary, Whitstable and the Essex flats, and sold by the barrel in London — yet native oysters were already dearer than they had been a generation earlier, as overfishing, pollution and hard winters thinned the beds. Recipes of this kind, which pad a small number of oysters with something cheap and gelatinous, sit alongside the outright "mock oyster" soups made from veal or salsify (long nicknamed the oyster plant) that can also be found in Victorian dictionaries of cookery. Ox-heel is the practical choice here: it is cheap, contributes almost no flavour of its own, and when simmered down releases enough gelatine to give a thin stock the slippery richness a real oyster stew would have had. Cutting it "about the size of a small oyster" is the whole trick, and it says a good deal about a household economy in which the appearance of plenty mattered as much as the substance.