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Plain Oyster Soup
Pour a quart oysters in colander, rinse by pouring over them pint cold water, put this in porcelain kettle, add a pint boiling water, let boil, skim thoroughly, season with pepper and piece of butter size of large egg; then add oysters, having removed all shells let boil up once, season with salt and serve. - Mrs. Lizzie C. Robinson.
A two-ingredient soup that lives or dies on one moment: the oysters go in last and stay in for seconds, not minutes. Everything else is preparation.
- The hinge"Let boil up once" means exactly that — the oysters go into the seasoned broth, the surface lifts to a boil, and the pot comes off the heat. That is 1 to 2 minutes, by which point the edges will have ruffled. Anything beyond it shrinks them and turns them rubbery.
- A quart of oystersA quart of shucked oysters in their liquor, roughly 2 lb. The count depends entirely on grade — anywhere from about 40 to 75 to the quart. Supermarket tubs are usually sold in pints or 16 oz containers, so you want two.
- Porcelain kettleAn iron pot lined with white enamel — the period's non-reactive pan. Use enameled cast iron or stainless; unlined aluminum or bare iron can pick up a metallic taste from the briny liquid.
- Butter size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books often measured butter by comparison to eggs, walnuts and hickory nuts, an egg being among the larger of these units.
- The rinsing water is the stockThe pint of cold water poured over the oysters carries their liquor with it, and that is what becomes the soup along with a pint of boiling water. Do not discard it. If you would rather not dilute, strain the liquor from the containers through a fine sieve and make up the volume with water.
- Skim, and pick overOyster broth throws a grey foam as it comes to the boil; take it off or the soup looks muddy. The instruction to remove all shells is not decorative — bits of shell and grit are common even in shucked oysters, so run your fingers through them in the colander.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is already saline and the amount varies from batch to batch. Season at the end, off the heat, and taste first.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a quart of oysters in roughly a quart of liquid will serve about four as a first course. No milk or cream here — versions enriched with milk are usually called oyster stew.
Before refrigeration made beef cheap and year-round, oysters were an everyday protein of the American East and Gulf coasts, hauled inland by barrel and by rail in large quantities and sold by the quart at prices that would now seem absurd. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) devotes page after page to them — plain soup, cream soup, fried, scalloped, patties — and the plainest version here is essentially a technique note rather than a formula: water, butter, pepper, and the oysters' own liquor, with nothing to get between the cook and the shellfish. The contributed name attached to the recipe is typical of the book's method; like many regional compilations of the period it was assembled from contributors' own kitchens, which is why the same dish can appear more than once in slightly different hands. The caution implicit in "let boil up once" is long-standing oyster wisdom, and it has not changed.