Oyster Bisque
1/2 pt. celery. 1 pt. oysters. 1 tablespoon flour. 1 pt. water. 1 qt. milk. 1 tablespoon butter. Salt and pepper to taste.
Chop celery fine and boil one-half hour in pint of water. Cut oysters fine and cook ten minutes in their own liquor. Rub flour and butter together in double boiler. Add quart of milk gradually. Add celery and oysters to milk. Season and cook twenty minutes. Strain. Serve in bouillon cups with one spoon whipped cream on each cup.
A smooth, strained oyster soup of the pre-blender era, where the oysters are cooked for flavor and then removed with the celery. A few of its measurements and timings need translating.
- The measuresA half pint of celery is one cup, chopped fine — roughly three or four ribs. A pint of oysters is about 16-20 shucked oysters with their liquor, the standard tub size at a fish counter.
- It is strained, and that is the pointEverything goes through a sieve at the end, so the oysters and celery are flavoring agents, not texture. The usual objection to cooking oysters half an hour does not apply here, since none of them reach the bowl. If you want oysters in the finished soup, hold back a few and add them at the very end for two minutes only.
- "Cook ten minutes in their own liquor"Oyster liquor is the liquid in the tub. A pint of oysters carries enough to poach them; there is no need to add water at this stage. Strain any grit out of the liquor before you use it.
- The double boilerWilson's roux is made over water because milk scorches easily on a direct flame. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works if you whisk steadily, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving over the full twenty-minute cook.
- One tablespoon of flour to a quart of milkThat is a very thin binding by modern standards — this is a soup, not a chowder. If you want more body, two tablespoons of flour and two of butter will still leave it pourable.
- Season lastOyster liquor and celery both carry salt, and the mixture reduces slightly. Taste after straining, not before.
- YieldAbout six cups, which fills six to eight bouillon cups as she intends, or four soup plates. The whipped cream should be unsweetened, spooned on at the table so it does not melt in.
Mary A. Wilson published cookbooks out of Philadelphia around 1920, when American oysters were still cheap enough to be a soup base rather than a luxury garnish. The Chesapeake and Delaware Bay beds supplied East Coast cities in enormous volume through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is why oyster stews, bisques and pan roasts crowd the soup chapters of books from this period. "Bisque" was originally a rich French soup, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most often made with crayfish or other shellfish and sometimes thickened with rice; by Wilson's day it had loosened to mean almost any strained, cream-enriched soup, and the flour-and-butter binding here is a common American simplification. The bouillon cup and the floating spoonful of whipped cream suggest a first course for a served dinner rather than a supper dish.