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Paprika (Celery salt cup cream Clean)
Celery salt 1 cup cream Clean, pick over, chop, and parboil oysters; drain, strain through cheesecloth, and add to liquor enough water to make one quart liquid. Brown butter, add flour, and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, oyster liquor. Let simmer one-half hour. Season with salt, paprika, and celery salt, and just before serving add cream. 1 pint oysters 4 cups Fish Stock 1/4 cup butter
The page has come through the scanner badly: the ingredient list has been shuffled into the title and split around the method, and the flour quantity is missing entirely. Read it as a brown-roux oyster soup made with 1 pint oysters, 4 cups fish stock, 1/4 cup butter, flour, celery salt, salt, paprika and 1 cup cream.
- The oysters barely cookThe oysters barely cook — Parboil means dropping them into their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, perhaps a minute. The recipe then loses sight of them: they are chopped and drained, and the printed method never returns them to the pot. The sensible reading is that they go back in with the cream, off the heat, since long simmering turns them to erasers.
- Missing flour amountMissing flour amount — The original quantity is lost in the garbled list. Equal butter and flour is the usual proportion for a roux of this kind, so about 1/4 cup flour to the 1/4 cup butter would give a light-bodied soup. Much more and it becomes a paste rather than a soup.
- "Brown butter, add flour"This is a brown roux, cooked until it smells nutty and takes on a tan colour. That colour is the whole character of the dish and separates it from the pale oyster stews elsewhere in the section. Keep the heat moderate and stir; a burnt roux is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Liquid arithmeticLiquid arithmetic — Strain the oyster liquor through cheesecloth to catch grit, then make it up to one quart. The method says water; the ingredient list says 4 cups fish stock. The two are best read as the same quart of liquid rather than a quart of liquor plus four cups of stock on top.
- Paprika in 1896Paprika — Read this as sweet mild paprika, used for colour and gentle fruit rather than heat; that is what American cookbooks of the period generally meant. Smoked or hot paprika will dominate the oysters. Buy it fresh; paprika that has sat two years is red dust.
- Adding the creamIn at the end, with the pan off direct heat. Bring the soup no higher than a bare steam afterwards — boiling after the cream goes in risks curdling against the salty, slightly acid oyster liquor.
- Salt lastSalt last — Oyster liquor, fish stock and celery salt all carry salt of their own, so season lightly. The recipe seasons before the cream goes in; taste again once the cream is added and the soup is at final volume.
- YieldAbout five cups finished, serving four as a first course.
Oyster soups run through American cookery of the nineteenth century in enormous variety, because oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans; cookbooks of the period carry several kinds, from a plain milk-thickened oyster stew to bisques like this one. What marks this version is the brown roux and the paprika, both signs of the French-influenced hotel and cooking-school style of the era — professional kitchen technique borrowed and scaled to a household range. The recipe also assumes something most modern cooks no longer have: oysters bought by the pint in their own liquor, that liquor being treated as the more valuable half of the purchase.