Oyster Bisque
1 quart oysters. Salt. 2 cups White Stock III 1½ cups stale bread crumbs 1 slice onion 2 stalks celery Sprig of parsley Bit of bay leaf 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 4 cups scalded milk
This is a Fannie Farmer ingredient list in its usual compressed form, and the transcription carries the same gap as many reprints: no oysters appear among the ingredients, and no method is given. What follows fills in what the book assumes its reader already knows.
- The missing oystersAn oyster bisque of this size would be built on something in the region of a pint to a quart of oysters with their liquor, chopped or pounded and heated gently so that the edges just ruffle before going into the soup. Nothing in the printed list above accounts for them.
- White Stock IIIA cross-reference to the stock chapter: a mild, unbrowned stock of the pale sort, typically veal and/or fowl and skimmed clear. A light, unsalted chicken stock is the nearest modern equivalent; avoid anything dark or heavily seasoned, which will fight the milk.
- Bread crumbs as the thickenerThe stale crumbs are simmered in the stock with the onion, celery, parsley and bay until soft, then rubbed through a sieve. They are the body of the soup, not a garnish. A blender does the work of the sieve, though the mixture should still be strained afterward for the aromatics and any grit.
- Scalded milkScalding meant heating to just below the boil, around 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. With modern pasteurised milk the step is no longer necessary for safety, but bringing the milk up separately keeps it from cooling the soup and reduces the chance of curdling when it meets the stock.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour, cooked together without colour for a minute or two, then let down with the hot milk. It is a light proportion, thinner than the book's thin white sauce; the crumb purée and the milk sauce are then combined.
- Do not boil after the oysters go inThe hinge of the dish. Oysters toughen within a minute of sustained boiling, and the milk will curdle against the oyster liquor if pushed hard. Bring the finished soup to a bare shiver, add the oysters and liquor, and serve at once.
- SeasoningThe list gives none. Salt and white pepper to taste, added after the oyster liquor, which is already saline. A few grains of cayenne and a spoonful of butter stirred in off the heat would be a finish in keeping with the period.
- YieldSix cups of liquid before the oysters, so six modest first-course servings or four generous ones. Traditionally sent to table with oyster crackers or small croutons.
Bisque in nineteenth-century American usage meant a thick shellfish soup enriched and bound to smoothness, and the word is generally traced to the French bisque of crayfish; by the time Fannie Farmer was teaching, it had been thoroughly naturalised to lobster, clams and above all oysters. Oysters were then a cheap staple of the Atlantic seaboard rather than a luxury, sold by the quart from barrels and shucked in enormous volume in Boston, New York and Baltimore, which is why the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book can spend page after page on oyster soups, stews, fritters and patties without comment. The bread-crumb thickening is older than the roux beside it, a survival of the medieval habit of binding sauces with bread, and it gives the soup a softer, slightly grainy body that flour alone will not produce. The bare ingredient list is keyed to a numbered stock elsewhere in the volume, a pattern of cross-reference from which it is often inferred that Farmer expected a reader who had already met the white sauce and the stock and needed only the proportions.