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Plain Oyster Stew
Place one quart of oysters in a colander and pour over them a cup of cold water. Look them over carefully and remove any bits of shell. Rub together a tablespoon of butter and the same quantity of flour, and add, gradually, one pint of warm milk. When hot, add the oysters and cook until the edges begin to ruffle. Season with salt, white pepper and celery salt.
A plain milk stew of the kind sold at oyster counters from the 1870s onward, thickened only slightly with a butter-and-flour paste. Almost everything depends on how briefly the oysters are in the pan.
- The hinge: ruffled edgesThe oysters are done the moment their edges curl, which takes roughly one to two minutes in hot milk. Left longer they shrink and go rubbery, and the milk begins to taste of them rather than of the stew. Pull the pan off the heat while the last few are still curling.
- Don't wash the flavour awayThe cup of cold water is there to loosen grit and shell fragments. Catch what runs through the colander, let it settle, and add the clear oyster liquor to the milk. A quart of shucked oysters carries a good deal of its seasoning in that liquid.
- How much is a quartA quart of shucked oysters weighs about 2 lb; the count varies a good deal with grade, from around three dozen large to considerably more of the smaller sizes. Buying shucked by the quart rather than in the shell saves a great deal of shucking for one pot of soup.
- The thickeningButter and flour rubbed together cold is a beurre manié: rub 1 tbsp of each to a smooth paste, then whisk the warm milk in gradually so it disperses before it sets. Adding the milk cold, or all at once, gives lumps.
- Milk and heatKeep the milk just below a simmer once the oysters go in. Boiling milk with oyster liquor in it is the usual cause of a curdled, grainy stew.
- White pepper and celery saltWhite pepper is specified so the stew stays pale; black pepper works but speckles it. Celery salt was a standard pantry item in 1911 and still carries the flavour the recipe is after -- season at the end, since the oyster liquor is already salty.
- YieldA pint of milk and a quart of oysters make four small first-course servings, or two generous bowls with crackers as a supper.
The plain oyster stew belongs to the era when oysters were cheap urban food rather than a luxury: American beds along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were being dredged on an industrial scale through the second half of the nineteenth century, and shucked oysters travelled inland by rail in sealed tins and kegs. Oyster saloons, oyster cellars and railway-station lunch counters all served a version of this stew, made to order in a small pan in a couple of minutes, and the Butterick book's method runs along much the same lines -- warm milk, a scrap of thickening, oysters in and straight out again. The celery salt is a period marker of its own; commercially ground celery seed and salt spread gradually as an American seasoning through the later nineteenth century and turns up constantly in soups and oyster dishes in cookbooks of this generation. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book as part of a broader library of household manuals aimed at the same middle-class subscribers.