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Oyster Bisque
When creaming oysters, if the juice is not used, save it and make a bisque for the next meal. (It should not be kept long.) Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, add two tablespoonfuls flour and stir until smooth. Add one cup of boiling water and one cup of strained oyster-juice. Season with salt and pepper and let boil. Mix beaten yolk of one egg with one-quarter cup of cream; add hot mixture to this slowly, stirring briskly. Serve at once. Chicken stock, if at hand, may be substituted for part or all of the water. Salmon Canapés Small pieces of white or rye bread can be profitably utilized by cutting them into neat round or oblong shapes, browning in fat in a frying-pan, and spreading with a canapé mixture made by rubbing some bits of smoked salmon to a smooth paste, mixing it with one tablespoonful of mixed mustard, one tablespoonful of Tarragon vinegar, one tablespoonful of finely chopped green sweet peppers, and one-half tablespoonful of finely minced capers.
Serve these at the beginning of a luncheon or a dinner.
Two recipes run together here: a thin velouté built on saved oyster liquor, and a canapé spread for scraps of smoked salmon. Both are salvage cookery, and both hinge on restraint with salt.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolkThe yolk and cream are the thickener and they curdle at around 180F. Temper by adding the hot base to the yolk mixture in a thin stream, then return it to low heat only long enough to thicken, or simply serve at once as written.
- Strain the liquor twiceOyster liquor carries sand and shell fragments. Pour it through a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or damp muslin, not just a colander, or the bisque will be gritty.
- Keeping the juiceThe parenthetical warning is the important one. Oyster liquor sours quickly; refrigerate it in a covered jar the moment it is drained and use it within a day, or freeze it. Discard it if it smells anything other than clean and briny.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is already salty, and chicken stock more so if you use it in place of the water. Season only after the base has boiled and reduced slightly.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of liquid gives a thin, soupy body rather than a coating one. Cook the flour a minute or two so it loses its raw taste, but keep it pale — this is a white sauce, not a brown one.
- YieldAbout two cups: two small first-course servings, or four demitasse cups.
- "Mixed mustard"In the canapé recipe this means prepared mustard from a jar, not mustard powder. A smooth Dijon or a plain yellow both work.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easy to make: steep a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a pinch of chopped tarragon is a fair stand-in.
- Canapé assemblyFry the bread rounds shortly before serving and let them drain and cool before spreading; the salmon paste will slide off hot fried bread and the bases go soft within the hour.
Books of this kind — American household manuals organised around the problem of the remainder — treat the liquor left in an oyster tin or shucking bowl as an ingredient in its own right, and rightly so: it is essentially a free shellfish stock. Oysters were cheap and abundant along the eastern seaboard through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, sold by the quart already shucked, and creamed oysters were common enough that the surplus juice was a recurring household question. The word bisque, generally traced to the French shellfish soups thickened with pounded shells or rice, had by this period loosened in American usage to mean almost any smooth, cream-enriched soup; the egg-and-cream liaison here is the older French technique, surviving in a domestic recipe that has otherwise been reduced to butter, flour and a cup of saved liquid. The salmon canapé that follows makes the same argument on the other side of the meal: small pieces of white or rye bread and the trimmings of a side of smoked salmon, dressed up with mustard, capers and vinegar, and served as if they had been intended all along.