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Clam and Oyster Soup
1 pint clams 1 pint oysters 4 cups milk 1 slice onion 2 blades mace Sprig of parsley Bit of bay leaf 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup flour Salt and pepper Clean and pick over oysters, using one-third cup cold water; reserve liquor, and add oysters slightly chopped. Clean and pick over clams, reserve liquor, and add to hard part of clams, finely chopped; put aside soft part of clams. Heat slowly to boiling-point clams and oysters with liquor from both, let simmer twenty minutes and strain through cheesecloth. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together and add soft part of clams. Scald milk with onion, mace, parsley, and bay leaf; remove seasonings, and add milk to stock. Season with salt and pepper.
A two-shellfish cream soup from the Boston Cooking-School tradition, built as a flavored stock rather than a chowder. The hinge is that the chopped clams and oysters are simmered only to give up their flavor and are then strained out and discarded.
- What a pint means hereA pint of clams or oysters is the shucked meats with their liquor, roughly 24-30 shucked oysters, or the meat of one to three dozen hard-shell clams depending on their size. Buying them already shucked in tubs, with the liquor, is the closest modern equivalent; ask the fishmonger to save the liquor if you shuck your own.
- Hard and soft parts of the clamOn a quahog or other hard-shell clam, the tough adductor muscle and mantle are the "hard part" and go into the simmering stock; the soft belly is set aside and stirred in at the end. If you are working with soft-shell clams, discard the black-tipped siphon skin as well.
- The twenty-minute simmerLong simmering would ruin shellfish meant to be eaten, but here the meats are strained out afterward, so the time is extracting flavor, not cooking dinner. Keep it at a bare simmer -- a hard boil pulls out a metallic, sulfurous edge.
- The soft parts at the endOnce the reserved bellies go in, give them two or three minutes over low heat, no more. They firm and shrivel quickly.
- Blades of maceA blade is one piece of the lacy aril from a nutmeg, so two blades is a mild presence. Substitute a scant 1/8 teaspoon ground mace, added to the milk and left in, since it cannot be strained out.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk with the aromatics to about 180F, just as bubbles form at the edge, then hold it off the heat for five or ten minutes to infuse before straining. Do not let the finished soup boil after the milk goes in.
- ThickeningThe butter and flour are used in equal volume, 1/3 cup of each; cook them together two or three minutes without color, then whisk in the hot strained shellfish stock a little at a time, whisking as you go to keep it smooth.
- SaltClam and oyster liquor is already salty and reduces during the simmer. Season only at the very end, after the milk has gone in.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four as a main course or six as a first course.
This is Fannie Farmer's territory: the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 and its many revisions codified New England shellfish cookery for a generation of home cooks, and the soup chapter runs through clam, oyster, lobster and fish stocks. The technique here -- a milk scalded with onion, mace, parsley and bay, then bound with a butter-and-flour roux in equal volumes -- is the school's standard cream soup formula, applied to whatever the market offered; swap the shellfish for celery or asparagus and the surrounding sentences barely change. Mace and blade spices were still ordinary pantry goods in the period, generally traced back through eighteenth-century English cookery, where mace was a common seasoning for milk-based fish and shellfish dishes. Combining clams and oysters in one pot reflects an Atlantic coast where both were cheap and abundant; oysters in particular were a working-class food in nineteenth-century American cities long before overharvesting and pollution made them a luxury.