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Bisque of Oysters
One pint of water; one quart of oysters; one pint of rich cream; one pint of milk; one pint of stale bread; one slice of onion; one bay leaf; one stick of celery; one sprig of parsley; two teaspoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one-eighth teaspoon of cayenne; one generous teaspoon of salt.
Chop the oysters, and put them in a stewpan with their liquor, one-half pint of water, the vegetables, herbs, salt, pepper and nutmeg; cook for thirty minutes on a rather cool part of the stove. Take one-half pint of water, and put it in a stewpan with the bread crumbs; cover the stewpan, and cook slowly for twenty minutes; at the end of that time rub through a fine sieve; strain the oyster mixture on this, pressing out every particle of moisture; return it to the stove, and add the hot milk, as well as the flour and butter, which should be beaten together. Let this mixture simmer for ten minutes, and rub it through a fine sieve once more; return it to the fire, and add the cream; cook for just one minute, stirring all the time, and serve immediately. One pint of white stock may be used instead of the pint of rich cream used in both the preceding recipes.
OYSTER SOUP (à la Parloa)-Use one quart of oysters for every six or eight people; one quart of milk; one pint of cold water; three tablespoons of flour; four of butter; one-half teaspoon of white pepper; a piece of onion the size of a half-dollar; a bit of mace and salt to taste. Put the oysters in a colander over a bowl; pour the cold water over them and stir with a spoon until all the liquid has drained into the bowl. Place the oysters in a bowl and set in a cold place. Put the water and oyster liquid into a stewpan and heat very slowly to prevent scorching. When the boiling point is reached skim carefully and set back where it will keep hot. At the time the oyster water is put on to heat, put one and one-half pint of the milk, the onion and mace on the fire in a double-boiler; stir the flour in the remainder of the cold milk and stir into the boiling milk; cook fifteen minutes. Now remove the onion and mace, let the oyster water boil up once and then stir in the thickened milk; put in the oysters, butter, salt and pepper, boil up once more and serve at once.
Two oyster soups run together on one page: a strained bisque thickened with bread, and Maria Parloa's plainer oyster soup with whole oysters. Both hinge on keeping the oysters away from a hard boil for any length of time.
- The hinge: oyster textureIn the bisque the oysters are chopped, cooked long, then pressed through a sieve and discarded — their flavour is the point, not their body, so the thirty minutes does no harm. In Parloa's version the whole oysters go in at the very end and the pot is brought up just once; anything more and they tighten and turn rubbery. Two minutes in hot liquid is enough to plump them and firm the edges.
- "A rather cool part of the stove"A range-top instruction from the coal-stove era, when heat was managed by moving the pan rather than turning a dial. Read it as the lowest simmer your burner will hold, or a heat-diffuser under the pan.
- One pint of stale breadBread was measured by volume: a pint of loosely broken crumb, roughly 2 cups, about 3 ounces. Use a dry, plain white loaf with the crust removed. Fresh bread turns pasty and modern sandwich bread with added sugar and softeners will not sieve cleanly.
- Nutmeg and cayenneThe ingredient list gives cayenne, the method calls for "pepper and nutmeg." Take the eighth teaspoon of cayenne as the pepper and add a scant grating of nutmeg — a quarter teaspoon at most in this quantity of liquid.
- Onion the size of a half-dollarA US half-dollar is about 1¼ inches across, so a slice of onion of that diameter — a couple of teaspoons chopped. It is meant to perfume the milk and be removed, not to be tasted as onion.
- Mace and the double boilerA blade of mace, not ground; it is fished out again. The double boiler is not fussiness — milk thickened with flour scorches readily over direct heat, and scorched milk cannot be rescued.
- Sieving"Rub through a fine sieve" twice means real work with a wooden spoon or a ladle. A food mill or a blender followed by one pass through a fine strainer gets the same smoothness with less labour, though the bisque should still be strained at the end to catch grit from the oyster liquor.
- YieldThe bisque probably makes somewhere in the region of two quarts of finished soup once the oyster and bread solids have been pressed out, enough for six to eight as a first course. Parloa gives her own guide: a quart of oysters serves six to eight.
- Substituting stock for creamThe note about a pint of white stock in place of the cream is a thrift option; the result is thinner and noticeably less sweet, so hold back a little of the salt until you taste it.
Bisque in nineteenth-century American cookbooks generally meant a smooth, sieved, cream-enriched soup of shellfish, and the bread-crumb thickening here belongs to an older European method, in which bread or rice rather than a roux bound such purées. Oysters were cheap and plentiful in the United States through the 1800s, shipped inland by rail and barrel in such volume that oyster soup and oyster stew were everyday winter fare rather than luxuries; the collapse of the great Chesapeake and Long Island beds later changed that arithmetic entirely. The second recipe is credited "à la Parloa" — Maria Parloa, one of the founding teachers of the Boston Cooking School and a prolific cookbook author, whose name on a recipe in a book like this functioned as a mark of reliability. Butterick, a pattern and magazine company, assembled its cook book for the same middle-class household that bought its dress patterns, and borrowing from recognised cooking-school authorities was ordinary practice.