Oyster Bisque
1 cup cream salt, pepper, cayenne 1 egg 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Cook oysters in white stock until edges curl. Strain, reserve liquor, and chop oysters; press through a sieve; add butter and flour cooked together, seasonings, and cream; cook five minutes, add to egg slightly beaten, and serve. Clam Bisque No. 2 Substitute clams for oysters and proceed as for oyster bisque. 4 cups oysters 1 cup milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons butter
The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and partly duplicated — a common fate for two-column cookbook pages. Read it as roughly 4 cups oysters, 1 cup cream, 1 cup milk, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, and seasonings, with white stock enough to cook the oysters (about 2 cups).
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersDrop them into simmering stock and pull them the moment the edges ruffle, about one to two minutes. Anything longer and they tighten into erasers, and no amount of sieving disguises it.
- White stockA pale, unbrowned stock of veal or chicken bones with no tomato or roasted vegetables. A mild chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; fish stock or bottled clam juice also works and leans the soup saltier, so season at the end.
- The egg is a liaison, not a custard"Add to egg slightly beaten" means pour the hot soup into the beaten egg in a thin stream while whisking. As printed it is served at that point; if you do return it to the pan, keep the heat low and do not let it boil, or the egg will curdle into threads.
- Press through a sieveThe chopped oysters would have been pressed through a fine sieve by hand. A blender does much the same work in seconds; pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the smooth texture the period expected.
- Butter and flour cooked togetherA white roux — cook the two for two or three minutes over low heat without letting it colour. As printed it is added to the sieved oysters along with the seasonings and cream, rather than the liquids being whisked into the roux.
- SeasoningCayenne here means a pinch, enough to warm the finish rather than register as heat. Salt last: oyster liquor and stock both carry salt of their own.
- YieldEnough for four as a first course. It does not reheat well once the egg is in, so make it to serve.
- The clam variationSubstitute shucked clams and their liquor. Clams are firmer and stronger-flavoured, so chop them finer and consider thinning the soup slightly with extra milk.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, one of many firms that issued a full general cookbook as advertising, with the house product woven through the sweets chapters and the rest of the book straightforwardly conventional New England cooking. An oyster bisque belongs squarely in that tradition. The word bisque comes from French cookery, and its origin is disputed: it is often said to have described a shellfish soup thickened with pounded meat or rice, though early French bisques also covered soups of birds and game. By the turn of the century American cookbooks had loosened it to mean almost any sieved, cream-enriched soup, which is why the same books also print bisques of tomato and of corn. The egg-and-cream finish is the older French liaison.