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Tomato Bouillon with Oysters
1 can tomatoes 1 1/2 quarts bouillon 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1/2 bay leaf 6 cloves 1/2 teaspoon celery seed 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns 1 pint oysters Mix all ingredients except oysters, and boil twenty minutes. Strain, cool, and clear. Add parboiled oysters, and serve in bouillon cups with small croutons.
A clear tomato-flavoured consommé with oysters floated in at the last moment. The success of it rests entirely on the clarifying step and on not overcooking the oysters.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesOysters go rubbery within about two minutes of heat. Drop them into their own strained liquor brought just to a simmer and lift them out as soon as the edges ruffle, roughly 30 to 60 seconds.
- "Clear" is clarifyingAfter straining and cooling, whisk in one or two lightly beaten egg whites (with their crushed shells if you like), bring slowly to a bare simmer without stirring, let the raft form, then ladle the liquid through a cloth-lined sieve. Skipping this leaves a cloudy soup, which defeats the point of serving it in bouillon cups.
- BouillonHere it means a light, well-flavoured beef or veal stock, not a cube. Use 6 cups of good unsalted or lightly salted stock; a heavily salted commercial broth will reduce to something aggressive over twenty minutes of boiling.
- A can of tomatoesPeriod can sizes varied and were not standardised; canned tomatoes were sold in containers ranging roughly from a pint to a quart. A modern 28 oz (about 800 g) can of whole tomatoes, juice included, is a reasonable stand-in.
- SpicesTie the bay, cloves, celery seed and peppercorns in a scrap of cheesecloth. They are meant to perfume the liquid, and a bag saves fishing whole cloves out of the strainer.
- A pint of oystersAbout 2 cups of shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly 16 to 24 depending on size. Save the liquor: it can be strained and added to the finished bouillon for depth.
- Boiling and colourTwenty minutes at a real boil is what extracts the tomato flavour, but do it before clarifying, never after. Once the soup is cleared, reheat it only to serving temperature.
- YieldRoughly six to eight bouillon cups after straining. Croutons should be cut small, no more than a quarter inch, and dried in a low oven rather than fried, so they do not slick the surface with fat.
Tomato bouillon belongs to the era when a clear soup opened almost every formal meal, and the ability to produce a genuinely transparent consommé was treated as a test of a cook's competence — hence the instruction to "clear" the liquid as a matter of course, with no explanation thought necessary. Canned tomatoes made a soup like this possible year-round, and by the late nineteenth century they were among the most common and cheapest canned goods in an American pantry, which is why cookery books of the period reach for a can without apology. Oysters were likewise still abundant and inexpensive on both coasts and in the Chesapeake, and were sold shucked by the pint. Serving the result in handled bouillon cups rather than soup plates marks it as a first course for company, drunk nearly as much as eaten.