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Oyster Stew (Quart oysters cup butter cups)
1 quart oysters 1/4 cup butter 4 cups scalded milk 1/2 tablespoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Clean oysters by placing in a colander and pouring over them three-fourths cup cold water. Carefully pick over oysters, reserve liquor, and heat it to boiling-point; strain through double cheesecloth, add oysters, and cook until oysters are plump and edges begin to curl. Remove oysters with skimmer, and put in tureen with butter, salt, and pepper. Add oyster liquor strained a second time, and milk. Serve with oyster crackers.
A stew in the New England sense: no thickening, no vegetables, just oysters, their liquor, and hot milk. It stands or falls on how briefly the oysters are cooked.
- The hinge: pull the oysters earlyThe oysters are done the moment the edges ruffle, which takes roughly one to two minutes in simmering liquor. Left in longer they tighten and turn rubbery, and no amount of milk will soften them again.
- A quart of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, about 2 pounds, and anywhere from two to four dozen or more depending on grade. Buy them in a tub from a fish counter rather than shucking your own, and keep every drop of the liquid.
- Why rinse, and why strain twiceThe three-quarters cup of cold water poured over the oysters flushes out shell fragments and grit. Straining the liquor through doubled cheesecloth both before and after cooking is not fussiness -- fine sand settles out at each stage and is unpleasant in a clear broth.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to about 180F, when it steams and a rim of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, then stop. Boiling it gives a cooked, slightly sulfurous flavor and risks curdling once the salty oyster liquor goes in.
- Assembling in the tureenThe butter is not melted in the pan; it is put in the serving tureen with the salt and pepper, and the hot liquor and milk melt it as they are poured over. A warmed tureen matters here, since nothing is reheated after this point.
- SeasoningHalf a tablespoon of salt is generous for a stew already carrying salty oyster liquor. Add half, taste after the milk goes in, and adjust.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; it makes roughly six cups, enough for about four as a first course or two or three as a supper. Oyster crackers are the period accompaniment; common saltines do the same job.
Oyster stew of exactly this kind -- oysters barely poached in their own liquor, finished with scalded milk and butter -- was everyday food on the American East Coast in the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap, abundant, and sold by the quart from barrels and street carts rather than by the half-dozen on ice. Here it sits among the soups, with no thickening and only salt and pepper for seasoning. The association with Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve tables in New England and the mid-Atlantic is often traced to Catholic and Anglican fasting customs, when a milk-and-shellfish dish satisfied the rule against meat; that link is traditional rather than firmly documented. By the time this book appeared, Chesapeake and Long Island Sound beds were already being fished hard, and the price of a quart of oysters would rise over the century that followed.