Oyster Bisque
1 quart oysters Bit of bay leaf 2 cups White Stock III 2 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 cups stale bread crumbs 2 tablespoons flour 1 slice onion 4 cups scalded milk 2 stalks celery Salt Sprig of parsley Pepper Clean and pick over oysters, reserving liquor, setting aside soft portions, and chopping gills and tough muscles. Cook White Stock, bread crumbs, reserved liquor, chopped oyster, onion, celery, parsley, and bay leaf thirty minutes. Rub through a sieve, bring to boiling-point, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Add milk, soft portion of oysters, and salt and pepper to taste.
A thickened oyster soup in the New England style, where stale bread crumbs do as much of the work as the flour. The one thing to watch is the finish: the soft oysters go in at the very end and need almost no cooking.
- The soft oystersOnce the milk is in, the reserved soft portions need only a minute or two in the hot bisque, just until their edges ruffle. Held longer, or boiled, they tighten into rubber and the soup goes cloudy.
- Oysters as sold todayThe direction to chop "gills and tough muscles" assumes oysters handled whole from the shell. Shucked oysters sold in a tub still include the gills and firm muscle; drain them, reserve every drop of liquor, and chop the firmer parts for the stock, keeping the plumper meats whole for the finish.
- White Stock IIIA cross-reference to the book's own basic stock of veal or veal and chicken, lightly seasoned and unbrowned. Two cups of any mild unsalted chicken or veal stock stands in; avoid dark or heavily herbed stock, which will bully the oysters.
- Scalded milkBring the milk to about 180F, when it steams and shivers at the edge but does not roll. Scalding was originally insurance against raw milk; with pasteurized milk it still helps the bisque come together warm rather than cooling the pot.
- Bread crumbs"Stale" means dry day-old bread, not packaged fine crumbs, which are drier still and will absorb more liquid. The crumbs soften during the thirty-minute simmer and, rubbed through the sieve, give the bisque its body.
- Rub through a sieveA food mill or a few pulses in a blender followed by a fine sieve does this faster. Push the solids hard: the flavor is in what goes through, and the oyster gills and celery strings are what should stay behind.
- Binding with butter and flourCook the two tablespoons of each together for a minute or two before whisking them into the boiling soup, so the flour loses its raw taste. Add it in pieces to the moving liquid rather than dumping it in at once.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is salty and its strength varies a great deal, so hold the salt until the milk and oysters are in and the soup is at its final volume.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts, enough for six to eight as a first course. It does not reheat well once the whole oysters are in; make the sieved base ahead if you need to.
Bisque in nineteenth-century American cookbooks meant almost any soup thickened and enriched to a smooth body, usually with shellfish, and the word had already drifted a long way from whatever French original it came from. Oysters made the most obvious candidate: until the beds of the Atlantic coast were fished down in the early twentieth century, they were cheap, sold by the quart already shucked, and turned up in soups, stews, patties, stuffings and sauces in nearly every household manual of the period. The construction here, where bread crumbs simmer in the stock and are then rubbed through the sieve, is older than the flour-and-butter roux that finishes the pot, and the recipe preserves both methods side by side.