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Oyster Bouillon
2 quarts oysters 1 onion I celery stalk I quart (4 cups) white stock Salt and pepper I onion Some whipped cream Put the oysters into a casserole, add the white stock, the onion and celery chopped, and the salt and pepper.
Simmer gently for one hour. Strain the soup, reheat it, and serve in earthenware bouillon cups with a tablespoonful of whipped cream on the top of each.
A clear oyster broth of the kind served before a heavy dinner, thickened only by a spoonful of cream floated on top. The method is sound, but the hour-long simmer needs rethinking.
- Casserole means saucepanHere a "casserole" is a lidded earthenware or flameproof pot used on direct heat, not an oven dish: the soup is simmered, not baked. Any heavy saucepan or Dutch oven does the job.
- How many oystersThe quantity of oysters has dropped out of the ingredient list. For a quart of stock, a pint of shucked oysters with their liquor gives a broth with real flavour; more than that and you are wasting good oysters on a straining.
- The hour-long simmerThe oysters are strained out at the end, so the long cooking is extracting flavour rather than cooking a garnish. A shorter simmer -- forty minutes or so -- will get most of what the oysters have to give, and a hard boil risks a cloudy broth. Keep it at a bare tremble.
- White stockThis means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Use a light, unsalted chicken stock and season at the end, since the oyster liquor brings its own salt.
- Strain properlyPass the soup through a fine sieve lined with damp muslin. Grit from the oysters and shreds of celery will otherwise settle in the cups and spoil an otherwise clear bouillon.
- The creamWhip to soft peaks only, unsweetened, and add it as the cups go to the table. Stiff cream sits on top like a lid; soft cream melts into the broth as it is drunk.
- YieldA quart of stock serves four in bouillon cups, or six as a small first course.
Oyster soups filled the American and British soup course through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap enough to be bought by the barrel and thought of as a workaday ingredient rather than a luxury. This version belongs to the refined end of that tradition: everything solid is strained away, leaving only a clear seasoned liquid to be sipped from handled cups, in the manner of the consommes and bouillons that opened formal dinners of the period. The whipped cream float is a standard finish of the era, borrowed from French practice, where it goes by the name of a soup mousseline.