Oyster Soup
1 quart oysters 4 cups milk 1 slice onion 2 stalks celery 2 blades mace Sprig of parsley Bit of bay leaf 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup flour Salt and pepper Clean and pick over oysters as for Oyster Stew; reserve liquor, add oysters slightly chopped, heat slowly to boiling-point, and let simmer twenty minutes. Strain through cheesecloth, reheat liquor, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with onion, celery, mace, parsley, and bay leaf; remove seasonings, and add to oyster liquor. Season with salt and pepper.
This is an oyster-flavored cream soup rather than a stew: the oysters are cooked hard, strained out, and only their liquor goes into the finished bowl. Read the method through before shopping, so the twenty-minute simmer does not come as a surprise.
- The oysters are a flavoring, not the garnishAfter twenty minutes of simmering they are spent, and straining through cheesecloth removes them along with the grit. If you want oysters in the bowl, hold back a dozen and poach them separately for a minute or two just before serving.
- A quart of oystersThat is shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly two pounds, or four 8-oz containers of shucked oysters from the fish counter. The liquor is the whole point here, so do not drain it away.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed; a blade is one whole piece. Two blades is somewhere around an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, depending on the size of the blades, added to the scalding milk and left to steep.
- Scalding the milkBring the four cups just to the point where a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge, around 180F, then take it off the heat and let the aromatics infuse for ten minutes before straining. Boiling it will not improve the flavor and risks scorching.
- The rouxA third cup each of butter and flour comes to about a tablespoon of flour per cup of finished liquid, a light cream-soup thickening. Cook it two or three minutes over low heat so the flour loses its raw taste, then whisk the hot oyster liquor in gradually to avoid lumps.
- Season at the endOyster liquor is already salty and varies a good deal from batch to batch. Taste after the milk goes in, then salt. White pepper keeps the soup pale if that matters to you.
- Holding and reheatingKeep it below a simmer once the milk is in; a hard boil on a flour-thickened dairy soup will curdle it at the edges. It yields roughly five cups, depending on how much liquor the oysters give up — enough for four as a first course.