Oyster Soup
1 pt. oysters. 1 pt. white sauce. 1 pt. sweet milk.
Make sauce; add milk. Put into this a little grated onion and celery, not enough to tell what it is. When well blended add oysters and let stand on stove until oysters curl, which will require only a few minutes after they become heated. Serve hot with toasted small butter crackers.
A plain milk-based oyster stew that depends almost entirely on restraint: the seasoning is meant to be undetectable and the oysters barely cooked. Two details in the original need translating.
- The hinge: pull them the moment they curlOysters are done when their edges ruffle, roughly two to three minutes in hot liquid. Held longer, or allowed to boil, they tighten into rubber and leak liquor that can curdle the milk.
- "Sweet milk"This means fresh, unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk a period kitchen also kept on hand. Whole milk is the right substitute; the soup is thin and needs the fat.
- A pint of white saucePeriod white sauce for a soup of this kind runs about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then a pint of milk whisked in and simmered until it lightly coats a spoon; that is a thin-to-medium sauce. Make it before the oysters go anywhere near the pot.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is roughly 16 to 20 oysters depending on size, or a 16-oz container from the fish counter. Save the liquor and add a few spoonfuls with them for depth.
- Onion and celery "not enough to tell what it is"Taken literally: about a teaspoon of grated onion and a tablespoon of finely grated celery for the full quantity. They are there to lift the milk, not to flavor it.
- Seasoning is unstatedThe recipe gives none. Salt to taste after the oysters go in, since their liquor is already salty, and add white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg if you want it.
- Small butter crackersProbably close to what is now sold as oyster crackers, though butter crackers were a distinct commercial type. The recipe only says "toasted"; drying them briefly in a moderate oven, or in a pan with butter, is closer to the intent than serving them from the bag.
- YieldAbout three pints of finished soup: four generous servings as a first course, or three as a light supper.
Milk-thickened oyster stew was standard American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when barreled and canned oysters shipped inland by rail made them a cheap staple far from any coast. This version belongs to the more refined end of that tradition: a proper white sauce rather than plain scalded milk, and aromatics deliberately kept below the threshold of recognition. Small crackers are a long-standing accompaniment to oyster stew, and the name "oyster cracker" is often said to derive from that pairing, though the origin is not settled. Oysters were then far more of an everyday food than they are now, which is why a soup calling for a full pint of them sits unremarked among the plainest recipes in the book.