No. 335

Oyster Soup, French Style

Soupe aux Huitres a la Francaise

Cut two ounces of onions into eighth of an inch squares; fry them without coloring in some butter, and add sixty medium oysters with as much water as there is oyster juice; then season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Place the saucepan on the fire, and remove again at the first boil, lay the oysters into a soup tureen and strain the broth through a fine sieve, returning it to the fire to add to it half a pint of bechamel (No. 409), and thicken it with egg-yolks, cream and butter, the proportions for each quart being, three raw egg-yolks, one gill of cream and two ounces of good butter. Make a garnishing of pike quenelles (No. 90), adding to it some cooked fine herbs; another, garnishing may also be used, composed of round bread croutons, each one inch in diameter, sprinkled over with butter and browned in the oven; serve these separately, but at the same time as the soup.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic velouté-style oyster soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things decide whether it works: the oysters leave the pot the moment the liquid boils, and the enriched broth never boils again afterward.

The hinge: pull the oysters at onceRanhofer means it literally — the pan comes off at the first boil and the oysters go straight into the tureen. Held in simmering liquid they shrink and turn to rubber within a couple of minutes.
Never boil the finished soupOnce the three yolks, gill of cream and butter go in, the soup is a custard. Hold it below 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon. A boil will curdle it into grains.
UnitsA gill is half a cup, so the liaison per quart is 3 yolks, 1/2 cup cream and 4 tablespoons butter. Half a pint of béchamel is 1 cup. Two ounces of onion is about half a small onion.
Quantity of oystersSixty medium shucked oysters is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 quarts with their liquor — a serious amount. Scaling to a dozen or two per quart of finished soup gives the same effect; expect the full recipe to serve eight to ten as a first course.
Salt lastOyster liquor is already saline and béchamel is usually seasoned. Season lightly at the start and correct only after the liaison is in, or the reduction will overshoot.
Béchamel No. 409The cross-reference is to Ranhofer's own béchamel — a white roux cooked with milk and, in his kitchen, often veal stock and aromatics. An ordinary well-cooked modern béchamel, thinned slightly, does the job.
Pike quenellesQuenelles No. 90 are a panada-and-pike forcemeat poached in dumplings. Pike is hard to buy; any lean white fish (pollock, haddock, walleye) makes a workable forcemeat. The buttered bread croutons, browned in a hot oven — Ranhofer gives no temperature — are the easier of the two garnishes and are meant to be passed separately.
NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained hand — in a pale seafood soup pre-ground nutmeg reads as dusty rather than aromatic.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a run of oyster soups that shows how thoroughly the American oyster had been absorbed into French restaurant cooking. New York harbor and the Chesapeake supplied oysters in such volume through the nineteenth century that they were cheap street food as well as banquet fare, and a chef could call for sixty of them in a single tureen without comment. What makes this version — à la française rather than the plain milk-and-butter oyster stew of American cookbooks is the structure: a mother sauce (béchamel) as the body, then a liaison of yolks, cream and butter, then a separate garnish of fish quenelles or oven-browned croutons handed round at the same moment. The technique follows the classical French method — sauce, enrichment, garnish, each built and finished apart — applied here to an American shellfish.