Home › Soups › Clam and Oyster Soup
Clam and Oyster Soup
1 pint clams Sprig of parsley 1 pint oysters Bit of bay leaf 4 cups milk 1/3 cup butter 1 slice onion 1/3 cup flour 2 blades mace Salt and pepper Clean and pick over oysters, using one-third cup cold water; reserve liquor, and add oysters slightly chopped. Clean and pick over clams, reserve liquor, and add to hard part of clams, finely chopped; put aside soft part of clams. Heat slowly to boiling-point clams and oysters with liquor from both, let simmer twenty minutes and strain through cheesecloth. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together and add soft part of clams. Scald milk with onion, mace, parsley, and bay leaf; remove seasonings, and add milk to stock. Season with salt and pepper.
A milk-based shellfish soup built on a strained clam-and-oyster stock rather than on the shellfish themselves. The point that matters most: almost everything solid is cooked out and discarded, so the flavour has to be extracted before the milk goes in.
- What gets eaten and what does notThe oysters and the chopped hard parts of the clams are simmered for their flavour and then strained out; only the soft bellies of the clams return to the pot, at the end, where they need no more than a minute or two. Do not try to salvage the strained shellfish into the finished soup — twenty minutes has already made it rubbery.
- A pint of clams or oystersBoth measures mean shucked shellfish with their liquor, roughly 1 lb each, not shellfish in the shell; the recipe's reserved liquor confirms this. At a fish counter ask for shucked quahogs or chowder clams and shucked oysters, often sold by the pint.
- Hard part, soft partOn a large clam the hard part is the tough foot and rim of mantle, the soft part the dark belly and surrounding flesh. Cut them apart with kitchen shears; the tough portion is what gets finely chopped for the stock.
- Blades of maceMace blades are the dried lacy covering of nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. If substituting, published equivalences vary — allow somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon ground mace for the two blades — and add it to the milk in a tea ball or strain the milk, since ground mace will not lift out the way a blade does.
- Slice of onionLiterally one thin slice cut across a medium onion, meant to perfume the scalded milk and then be removed. It is a light seasoning, not an onion soup base.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk with its aromatics just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, and hold it there off the heat for a few minutes to infuse. Once the milk joins the stock keep the soup below a boil — salty shellfish stock and milk can curdle if it is pushed.
- The rouxA third cup each of butter and flour cooked together thickens the roughly five to six cups of stock and milk at about a tablespoon of flour per cup, a light thickening; cook it two or three minutes so it loses its raw taste, and whisk the hot stock in gradually.
- GritThe cheesecloth strain is not optional. Clams carry sand, and there is no way to correct for it later.
- YieldAbout five to six cups, four to six first-course servings. Salt late — the shellfish liquor is already saline and its concentration varies.