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BISQUES Oyster Soup
1 qt. oysters 1 qt. milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Drain oysters through wire strainer placed over bowl, reserve the liquor. To wash: Pour over the oysters cold water, using 2 cups water to each quart of oysters. Examine each oyster for bits of shell.
Put the liquor on to boil, skim, and strain through double cheesecloth. Scald the milk, thicken with Gold Medal flour and butter cooked together; cook the oysters in the cleared liquor until they grow plump and the edges curl. Add this to the milk foundation with seasonings, and serve.
A straightforward oyster stew in the guise of a bisque. Everything depends on how briefly the oysters see heat.
- The hinge: cook the oysters barely at allPlump bodies and curled edges take about one to two minutes in the simmering liquor. Anything past that and they tighten into rubber, and no amount of milk will bring them back.
- A quart of shucked oystersThat is roughly 2 lb of shucked meats, somewhere between two and four dozen depending on grade, sold in tubs by weight or volume. Buy them with their liquor; you need it for the base.
- Don't skip the washing waterThe 2 cups of cold water per quart rinses out grit and shell fragments. Rinse water is discarded; the reserved liquor, boiled, skimmed and strained through doubled cheesecloth, is the flavor.
- Scalded milkHeat to about 180F, just until it steams and shivers at the edge of the pan. It should not boil, and the pan should be heavy-bottomed or the milk sugars will scorch.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons each butter and flour cooked together for a minute or two, kept pale. Whisk the hot milk in gradually to keep it smooth; the finished soup should be a thin cream, not a gravy.
- Order of assemblyAdd the oysters in their cleared liquor to the thickened milk off high heat, with the seasonings, and serve at once. Holding the finished soup hot on the stove overcooks the oysters and can curdle the milk with the salty liquor.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is a starting point only; oyster liquor varies enormously in saltiness. Taste after the liquor goes in.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; two quarts will serve about six as a first course, four as a supper. Oyster crackers or plain toast were the usual accompaniment.
Oyster soup sits comfortably in a flour company's cookbook because the milk needs thickening, and the roux is where the flour comes in. Oysters were cheap, abundant and widely shipped by rail in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is why American church suppers, hotel menus and Christmas Eve tables all leaned on them; the East Coast beds were still producing on a scale hard to imagine now. American usage of "bisque" was loose and inconsistent, though it was sometimes taken to imply a thickened milk foundation rather than, as in French usage, a base built from pounded shells. The instruction to examine each oyster for bits of shell is a reminder that these arrived shucked by hand into tins, not machine-cleaned.