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French Oyster Soup
1 quart oysters 1/3 cup butter 4 cups milk 1/3 cup flour 1 slice onion Yolks 2 eggs 2 blades mace Salt and pepper Make same as Oyster Soup, adding yolks of eggs, slightly beaten, just before serving. Garnish with Fish Quenelles.
Oyster Soup, Amsterdam Style 1 quart oysters 1/2 teaspoon salt Water Paprika 3 tablespoons butter Celery salt 3 1/2 tablespoons flour 1 cup cream Clean, pick over, chop, and parboil oysters; drain, strain through cheesecloth, and add to liquor enough water to make one quart liquid. Brown butter, add flour, and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, oyster liquor. Let simmer one-half hour. Season with salt, paprika, and celery salt, and just before serving add cream.
A cream oyster soup finished with an egg-yolk liaison. The instruction to "make same as Oyster Soup" assumes the preceding page: scald the milk with the onion and mace, thicken with a butter-and-flour roux, and add the oysters and their strained liquor at the end.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilBeat the yolks, thin them with a ladle of the hot soup, then stir the mixture back into the pot off the heat. Returning it to a boil will curdle the yolks into threads and the soup cannot be brought back.
- Oysters need two minutes, not moreAdd the shucked oysters to the finished soup and cook only until the edges ruffle. Anything approaching a quarter hour of simmering turns them tough and shrunken, and their liquor is where most of the flavour lives.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor carries grit and shell fragments. Pour it through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth before it goes anywhere near the milk.
- Blades of maceMace is the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, and a "blade" is one flattened piece. Two blades infused in the scalding milk and lifted out are perhaps the equivalent of 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace, though such conversions vary a good deal; ground mace will also cloud the soup and cannot be removed.
- Measures1/3 cup butter is about 5 1/3 tablespoons; with 1/3 cup flour that gives a thin veloute, correct for a soup rather than a sauce. A quart of shucked oysters is several dozen -- around 40 to 50 for the largest grades and more for smaller ones -- sold today in pint or quart tubs at a fish counter.
- Salt at the endOyster liquor is already saline and varies a great deal between batches. Season only after the oysters and liquor are in.
- Fish quenellesThe garnish is a poached forcemeat dumpling of white fish pounded with egg white and cream, shaped in two spoons and simmered in salted water. It is a real project; small croutons or a spoon of whipped cream carry the dish perfectly well without it.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly six cups of soup; the book states no yield. Do not attempt to reheat leftovers on the stove -- the yolks will break. Warm gently and briefly, or serve cold.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks distinguished plain "oyster soup" -- oysters warmed in milk with butter, hardly more than a stew -- from the dressed-up versions that carried a nationality in the title. The "French" label here seems to point to technique rather than to any French origin: the finishing liaison of egg yolks stirred in off the fire and the quenelle garnish both belong to a borrowed classical French vocabulary. Oysters themselves were cheap and abundant on both American coasts well into the early twentieth century, which is why they appear in soups, stews, patties and stuffings throughout these books rather than as a luxury.