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Ostend Soup
There are many varieties of this soup to be met with in the different hotels, but it is a white soup, made of fish pieces and trimmings, strained, returned to the pot, and with plenty of cream and oysters added before serving. It should never boil after the cream is put in. A little mace is usual, but no onions or shallot. A simple variety is made with flour and milk instead of cream, the liquor of the oysters as well as the oysters, and a beaten egg added at the last moment.
A description rather than a set of quantities, in the style of the whole of this book. The technique is clear enough to work from, but you supply the proportions yourself.
- The hingeOnce the cream goes in, the soup must not boil. A fish veloute carrying cream and oyster liquor can separate and turn grainy at a full boil; hold it just below a simmer, around 180F.
- Oysters need two minutesThe oysters go in at the very end and are done the moment their edges ruffle. Anything approaching a quarter of an hour turns them tough and shrinks them by half.
- Working proportionsAs a suggestion, since the original gives none: for four servings, about 2 lb of fish heads, bones and trimmings simmered 20-30 minutes in 5 cups of water, strained, then finished with 1 cup of cream and 12 to 18 shucked oysters with their liquor. Fish stock is generally held to suffer if simmered much longer than half an hour.
- "Fish pieces and trimmings"Flat-fish and other lean white fish frames give the clean, pale stock intended here. Avoid salmon, mackerel and other oily fish, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Mace, and nothing elseMace is the outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. The exclusion of onion and shallot presumably keeps the soup white and lets the oyster liquor read clearly, though the text gives no reason. A blade of mace steeped in the stock is easier to remove than ground.
- The plainer versionFlour and milk in place of cream means a thin white sauce: cook about 2 tablespoons flour in butter, loosen with the stock, then the milk. The beaten egg added at the last moment is a liaison and will scramble over direct heat, so pull the pan off the burner, temper the egg with a ladle of hot soup first, and return it without reheating.
- Salt at the endOyster liquor is salty and varies a good deal between batches. Season only after it has gone in.
Ostend was Belgium's great sea-bathing resort and fishing port, and its oyster parcs — beds where oysters were fattened in shallow basins along the coast — supplied dining rooms across northern Europe in the nineteenth century; "Ostend oysters" appeared on London and Paris menus as a mark of quality. It may be no more than a guess, but that trade sits oddly well with a hotel soup from a Flemish seaside town built on cream and oysters rather than the mussels more usually associated with the Belgian coast, and with a recipe described as varying from hotel to hotel: this reads as restaurant cooking for visitors, not a farmhouse dish. The Belgian Cook Book was assembled during the First World War from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees, with the proceeds going to their relief, and something of that origin shows in the looser entries — a cook telling you how a thing is done rather than writing out a formula.