Oyster Soup
Pour a quart of cold water over a pint of oysters. Drain through a colander.
Put the water drained from the oysters into a saucepan. Simmer gently three minutes. Remove the scum. Add to the broth in the saucepan one tablespoon each of butter and flour stirred to a paste.
Cook three minutes or until smooth, stirring meanwhile. Then add half a cup of unsweetened condensed milk, or common cream, and season to taste with salt and pepper. When the soup boils, add the drained oysters, and as soon as it again boils and the edges of the oysters curl and separate, remove from the fire and serve.
A very plain oyster soup that builds its base from the oyster liquor itself rather than a stock. Two things decide whether it works: how carefully you handle the liquor, and how briefly the oysters are in it.
- The oystersA pint of shucked oysters is roughly a pound, about 16 to 24 depending on size, and is sold in tubs in most fish departments. Buy them with their liquor, not drained and rinsed.
- What the water is forThe quart of cold water is a rinse that loosens grit and shell fragments; it drains off carrying the oyster liquor with it, and that diluted liquor is your broth. Pour the drained liquid through a fine sieve or cloth before it goes in the pan, since anything gritty ends up in the finished soup.
- Unsweetened condensed milkThis is what is now sold as evaporated milk. Half a cup of it, or of cream, is what thickens and rounds a broth that is otherwise mostly salty water.
- The butter and flourOne tablespoon each makes a very light binding for roughly a quart of liquid, so expect a thin soup rather than a chowder. Stir the paste in off the boil in small pieces to avoid lumps, then cook it three minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- The hinge: the final boilOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, which takes one to two minutes in hot liquid. Take the pan off the heat at that point; held at a boil they tighten into rubber and leak liquid that thins the soup.
- SaltSeason only after the milk goes in and taste again after the oysters, which release more salt as they heat. Oyster liquor is already saline and the soup is easy to overshoot.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but a quart of liquid plus half a cup of milk and a pint of oysters comes to about four first-course servings. It does not reheat well, for the reason above, so make what you will eat.
Oyster soups and stews of this kind were everyday cooking in nineteenth-century America, not luxury food: oysters were dredged in enormous quantities from Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, and sold cheaply enough that oyster saloons were a fixture of ordinary city streets. The recipe's brevity reflects that familiarity, and its use of "unsweetened condensed milk, or common cream" suggests a date no earlier than the mid-1880s, when unsweetened canned milk first became commercially available in America, and more likely later, as it spread into ordinary pantries. The distinction between sweetened condensed milk and the unsweetened kind mattered enough that cookbooks of the period spelled it out, as this one does. The near-total absence of aromatics, no onion, no celery, no bay, is characteristic of the plainer school of American cookery that treated the oyster's own liquor as sufficient flavoring.