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Some Kitchen Kinks: Broth
Oyster Broth.-1 pint of oysters; 1 cupful of cold water.
Mince the oysters fine, put in cold water and let simmer for fifteen minutes over a slow fire; skim, strain, and season.
Clam Broth.-6 clams; 1 cupful of boiling water; 1 teaspoonful of powdered cracker; 1 teaspoonful of butter. Let clams stand in boiling water until the shells open; drain off the liquor, add cracker, butter, and seasoning.
Tapioca.-2 tablespoonfuls of Minute Tapioca; 1½ cupfuls of boiling water; 1 cupful of cold water.
Cover tapioca with cold water and let soak ten minutes; put into boiling water and boil until clear; sweeten, and add nutmeg or wine, if desired.
Three invalid-cookery broths from the same page: two shellfish extractions and a tapioca gruel. All are deliberately thin, meant for someone who cannot manage solid food, so judge them by clarity and seasoning rather than body.
- The fifteen minutes is not a mistake hereOrdinarily oysters need two minutes or they turn to rubber. In this recipe the oysters are minced and then discarded at the straining step, so the long slow simmer is doing extraction, not cooking. Keep it below a bare tremble; a rolling boil makes the broth cloudy and flat.
- QuantitiesA pint of shucked oysters weighs roughly a pound (about 450 g); the number of oysters in it varies a good deal with size. It is normally sold with its liquor, which can go into the pot rather than being drained away, since much of the salt and flavour is in it.
- Clams and their sandSix clams here are most likely hard-shell clams (quahogs or littlenecks). Scrub them and let them stand in salted water for half an hour first so they purge grit, otherwise the broth will be sandy no matter how carefully you strain it. Discard any that stay shut after they have been in the boiling water several minutes.
- Powdered crackerA plain soda or water cracker crushed to dust, used as a light thickener. A teaspoon of crushed cracker or oyster cracker does the same job; it should thicken almost imperceptibly, not make a porridge. Season with that in mind if the cracker is a salted one.
- StrainingFor the oyster broth, a fine sieve lined with damp muslin gives a much clearer result than a sieve alone. Skim the grey scum off before straining rather than after.
- Minute TapiocaStill sold, and still the right product: quick-cooking granulated tapioca, not the pearls. Whole pearl tapioca will not soften in ten minutes of soaking and will need far longer cooking. "Boil until clear" is the real test.
- Seasoning the tapiocaSweeten to taste. "Wine" in invalid cookery of this period usually meant a spoonful of a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira, stirred in off the heat; the alcohol is not cooked off, which is worth knowing before serving it to anyone.
- YieldAll three are small, single-invalid quantities, though the tapioca, with two and a half cupfuls of liquid in all, makes rather more than a cupful. They do not keep; the shellfish broths in particular should be made and drunk the same hour.
These belong to the once-large genre of invalid cookery, the branch of household writing devoted to feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very young at a time when a serious illness was nursed at home for weeks. Broths of this kind were valued precisely for having almost nothing in them: the solids were strained out or discarded, on the reasoning that a weakened stomach could absorb nourishment from liquid it could not get from meat. Oysters and clams were cheap and abundant on the American coasts through the nineteenth century, and shellfish broth duly has its place in these sections. Minute Tapioca, a pre-gelatinised granular product, was a convenience ingredient of the period, and its appearance under a brand name in a recipe otherwise written in plain generic terms may hint at how readily such products were taken for granted in domestic manuals.