Oyster Soup
Oyster soup for six will need 30 oysters. Drain them, rinse, and drain again. Scald the liquor, boil and skim for five minutes, then measure.
Take twice the quantity of milk, heat in the double boiler; for each ½ pint blend I level tablespoonful of flour with enough water to make a paste, turn into the milk and stir until thickened. Season highly with salt and pepper; have the oyster liquor heating separately. Drop the oysters into the thickened milk and when they begin to ruffle add the hot liquor. Taste to see that the soup is well seasoned and take at once from the fire, serving with small crackers.
A plain oyster stew thickened lightly with flour, from the era when milk-based soups were built in a double boiler to keep them from catching. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the oysters are drained.
- The hinge: the ruffleOysters are done the moment their edges curl, which takes roughly a minute or two in hot milk. Pull the pot off the heat as the recipe says — held longer they tighten into rubber and leak liquid that thins the soup.
- Quantities and yieldThirty oysters serves six as a first course. Shucked oysters vary a good deal in size, so thirty may come to anywhere from a pint upward; the milk quantity follows from whatever liquor you actually measure after scalding and skimming, which is twice that volume.
- "Liquor" means the oyster juiceNot alcohol — the salty liquid in the shell or the container. Strain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter after scalding, since grit and shell fragments settle in it. The five minutes of boiling and skimming clarifies it and drives off some of the raw edge.
- For each ½ pintThat is one level tablespoon of flour per half pint, i.e. per cup, of milk. Blend it smooth with water before it goes in, or it will lump on contact with hot milk.
- Double boilerUseful but not required. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works if you stir; the point is that thickened milk scorches easily and scorched milk cannot be rescued.
- Season highlyMilk and flour mute salt badly, and the oyster liquor is already saline, so salt after the liquor goes in rather than before. White pepper is traditional here if you dislike black flecks; a little cayenne is a common period addition.
- Buying oystersShucked oysters in tubs from a fish counter are the practical choice and give you the liquor for free. Discard any that smell of anything other than clean seawater, and keep them at refrigerator temperature until they go into the pot.
- Serving"Small crackers" means oyster crackers or plain water biscuits, floated on top or passed alongside. The soup does not hold — it separates and the oysters toughen — so ladle it as soon as it comes off the heat.
Oyster soup and oyster stew appear in nearly every American cookbook of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their presence in a low-cost collection is a reminder of how differently oysters were once priced. Beds along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and the rail and canal lines that carried barrels of shucked oysters inland, made them one of the cheapest sources of protein in the country through the 1800s; the collapse of the great Chesapeake and New York fisheries from overharvesting and pollution is what turned oysters into a luxury. The milk-based version here is the near-universal one — plain, quick, thickened just enough to coat a spoon — though tomato-and-butter oyster soups circulated alongside it.