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Pepper (Clean and pick over oysters)
Clean and pick over oysters, reserving liquor, setting aside soft portions, and chopping gills and tough muscles. Cook White Stock, bread crumbs, reserved liquor, chopped oyster, onion, celery, parsley, and bay leaf thirty minutes. Rub through a sieve, bring to boiling-point, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Add milk, soft portion of oysters, and salt and pepper to taste.
This is an oyster bisque built the classical way: the tough parts of the oyster are simmered into the base and sieved out, while the tender bellies go in at the very end. The book's ingredient column has not travelled with the text, so treat the quantities below as reconstruction rather than transcription.
- The hingeThe soft portions of the oyster go into the finished soup off the boil and need only a minute or two to plump and firm at the edges. Anything longer and they shrink into rubber, which is exactly why the recipe sends the gills and muscles into the thirty-minute stock and holds the bellies back.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient column is absent, so any figures are a guess. One workable set: 1 pint shucked oysters with their liquor, 1 quart White Stock, about 1/2 cup soft bread crumbs, a slice of onion, a stalk of celery, a sprig of parsley and one bay leaf, finished with 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk.
- White StockA separate recipe elsewhere in the book; white stocks of the period were built on veal knuckle or fowl simmered without browning, so the liquid stays pale. A light unsalted chicken stock is the nearest substitute; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Picking over oysters"Pick over" means running each oyster through your fingers for bits of shell and grit. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve or cloth for the same reason. The gills are the frilled edge and the tough muscle is the pale opaque nub where the oyster was attached to the shell.
- Bind with butter and flour cooked togetherA roux, cooked to blond only, then whisked into the boiling sieved liquid off the heat and simmered a couple of minutes to lose the raw-flour taste. Some cooks kneaded the butter and flour raw as beurre manié; the instruction here specifies cooking them first.
- Rubbing through a sieveOriginally done with a wooden pestle through a china cap or hair sieve. A food mill or a short blitz followed by a fine-mesh strainer does the same work, but do not skip the straining: the point is to leave the fibrous muscle behind.
- Bread crumbs as thickenerThe recipe does not specify, but soft fresh crumbs suit the method better than dried or seasoned ones: they break down during the thirty-minute simmer and give body before the roux is added, whereas dry crumbs are more likely to stay gritty in the sieve.
- Milk and curdlingAdd the milk warm and keep the finished soup below a simmer. The base is salty from the oyster liquor, and a hard boil after the milk goes in can make it break.
Oyster soups run to several pages in the Boston Cooking-School tradition because oysters were cheap, plentiful and shipped inland by rail through the last decades of the nineteenth century. This version is the most refined of the family: not the plain oyster stew of milk, butter and oysters that appeared on supper tables, but a sieved and bound bisque in the French manner. The careful division of the oyster into tough parts for the stock and soft parts for the finish is a small piece of thrift-plus-technique that runs right through the book.