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French Oyster Soup
1 quart oysters 4 cups milk 1 slice onion 2 blades mace. 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup flour Yolks 2 eggs Salt and pepper Make same as Oyster Soup, beaten, just before serving. adding yolks of eggs, slightly Garnish with Fish Quenelles.
Oyster Soup, Amsterdam Style 1 quart oysters
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it takes the book's plain Oyster Soup and enriches it with egg yolks, a classic French liaison. The butter and flour given here are the thickening for a quart of liquid.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inSlacken the beaten yolks with a few spoonfuls of hot soup first, stir them back into the pot off the heat, and hold it below a simmer. Above about 180F the yolks scramble and the soup turns grainy, and it cannot be brought back.
- Oysters need two minutes, not fifteenOysters need only a couple of minutes -- Cook them only until the edges ruffle and they plump. Long standing in hot liquid makes them rubbery.
- Butter and flour proportionsOne-third cup of each is a fairly heavy roux; the printed recipe gives no liquid quantity, so the proportion depends on the base Oyster Soup recipe it refers back to. Cook it a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the liquid gradually so the soup stays smooth.
- Strain the oyster liquorLiquor drained from the shucked oysters carries bits of shell and grit. Pour it through a fine sieve or a damp cloth before it goes into the soup; it is the main source of flavour and should not be discarded.
- Fish quenellesThese are small poached dumplings of pounded raw fish bound with egg and cream, shaped with two spoons and gently poached in salted water or fish stock. A modern equivalent is a light pike, sole or haddock mousseline; a few per bowl is plenty.
- SeasoningSalt cautiously at the end. Oyster liquor is already saline, and reduction plus the salt in commercial butter can push a finished soup past pleasant.
- YieldThe recipe as printed gives no quantity of oysters or liquid; the '1 quart oysters' on the page opens the following recipe, Oyster Soup, Amsterdam Style. Serve it as soon as the yolks are in; it does not reheat.
Egg yolks stirred into a finished soup off the fire is one of the older thickenings in the French kitchen, and the label "French" in American cookbooks of this period often signalled enrichment with yolks, cream, or both. The book's soup chapter works in families: a plain oyster soup first, then variations that add a liaison, a garnish, or a national name. Oysters were still cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast in this period, and were sold shucked by the quart. Quenelles mark the dish as company food -- they take pounding, sieving and poaching.