Oyster Stew
1 quart oysters 4 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup butter 1/2 tablespoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Clean oysters by placing in a colander and pouring over them three-fourths cup cold water. Carefully pick over oysters, reserve liquor, and heat it to boiling-point; strain through double cheesecloth, add oysters, and cook until oysters are plump and edges begin to curl. Remove oysters with skimmer, and put in tureen with butter, salt, and pepper. Add oyster liquor strained a second time, and milk. Serve with oyster crackers.
A classic New England oyster stew, built on the oysters' own liquor rather than a roux. The whole dish takes about ten minutes once the oysters are shucked.
- Do not overcook the oystersThe instruction to cook only "until oysters are plump and edges begin to curl" is the hinge of the recipe. That is roughly one to two minutes in the simmering liquor; beyond that they tighten into rubber and leak their liquid.
- Scalded milkHeating milk to just below the boil, until it steams and shows a ring of small bubbles at the edge, about 180F. Originally done to check souring in unpasteurized milk; today it serves to bring the milk up to serving temperature without letting it boil and curdle against the salty oyster liquor.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of shucked oysters is about 2 lb; depending on grade that is roughly three to five dozen. Buy them already shucked in their liquor, in a tub, rather than trying to get a quart of meat out of the shell.
- The rinsing waterThe three-fourths cup of cold water poured over the oysters in the colander rinses them and drains away; the liquor to be saved is what came packed with the oysters.
- Straining twiceOyster liquor carries sand and shell fragments. Double cheesecloth, or a fine strainer lined with a coffee filter, catches them; the second straining after the oysters have cooked in it is worth doing.
- SaltHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons. Oyster liquor is already saline, so season at the end and taste first.
- YieldSix generous servings as a first course, four as a supper dish.
- ServingA tureen keeps the stew hot without further cooking, which is the point of assembling in it rather than returning the pan to the heat. Oyster crackers are small round soda crackers; common saltines broken up do the same work.
Oyster stew belongs to the period when oysters were cheap urban food rather than a luxury: the beds of the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound and Massachusetts Bay supplied barrels of them to inland cities by rail and ice, and "oyster saloons" and oyster cellars were fixtures of nineteenth-century American towns. Cookbooks of this school treat the stew as the plainest possible showcase for the shellfish, deliberately leaving out flour, onion and anything else that would compete with the liquor. Its association with Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving suppers in parts of the United States is often traced to Catholic and Irish observance of a meatless vigil meal, though the custom spread well beyond those households.