No. 337

Soup with Oyster Ravioles

Soupe aux Ravioles d'Huitres

Poach in white wine three or four dozen large oysters, drain them, and keep the broth; cut the oysters into small dice, and thicken this salpicon with three spoonfuls of pike forcemeat (No. 90), and as much reduced bechamel (No. 409). With this salpicon and some raviole paste (No. 147), rolled out very thin, prepare some small round ravioles, cutting them out with a pastry cutter one inch and a quarter in diameter. Put to boil on the side of the fire, three quarts of thickened fish stock (No. 195); add to this the oyster broth, and despumate the whole for twenty-five minutes; at the last moment remove all the fat, and thicken the soup with a thickening of four or five egg-yolks, cream, butter, season to taste with salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Pour the soup into a tureen, add to it the ravioles, previously cooked for twelve minutes in salted water.

← No. 336 Oyster Soup with Powdered Okra or Gumbo Soups & Broths No. 338 Partridge Soup a la Royale →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Ranhofer garnish soup: a clear-ish thickened fish stock finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, carrying poached-oyster ravioli. The cross-references (Nos. 90, 147, 195, 409) mean you are building four preparations before the soup exists, so read it as an assembly plan rather than a single recipe.

The hinge: the liaison must not boilFour or five yolks slackened with cream and mounted with butter will curdle the moment the soup simmers. Draw the pot off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot stock, return them, and hold the soup below 180F until it coats a spoon.
DespumateIt means to skim — hold the pot at a bare tremble on the side of the fire so the scum and fat gather on the cool side and can be lifted off. Twenty-five minutes of that is clarification, not reduction; do not let it come to a rolling boil.
Poaching the oystersThree or four dozen large oysters go into the wine only until their edges ruffle, well under two minutes. They are then diced and bound, so they will be heated a second time in the ravioli; overcooking at this stage gives rubbery specks in the filling.
Pike forcemeat and bechamelNo. 90 is a pounded pike quenelle forcemeat; any fine white-fish mousseline (pike, pollock, whiting) blitzed with egg white and cream serves the same purpose, which is to glue the oyster dice together. The bechamel must be reduced until stiff or the filling will weep through thin pasta.
Raviole paste and sizeRolled out very thin, as the recipe directs; No. 147 is presumably an egg-enriched pasta, though the text here does not say. The 1¼-inch cutter gives a filled round about the size of a large coin, and you want roughly six to eight per person.
Twelve minutes is too longTwelve minutes -- Longer than very thin pasta needs on its own, but the filling is bound with raw pike forcemeat and has to cook through, which is probably why the time is set where it is. Keep it at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil, which will split the seams and cloud your carefully skimmed soup, and test one before serving.
CayenneA pinch means a pinch. The point is to lift the sweetness of the oyster liquor, not to register as heat.
YieldThree quarts of stock plus the oyster broth serves ten to twelve as a first course, or six generously.

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 soup shows exactly what that kitchen was: French technique applied to American raw material. Oysters were the cheap abundance of the period — the beds of New York harbour and Chesapeake Bay supplied them by the barrel, and they turn up in Ranhofer's book fried, stewed, in gumbo (No. 336, immediately preceding this one) and, here, minced into a ravioli filling and floated in a thickened fish stock finished with a liaison. The raviole itself most likely arrives by way of the French professional repertoire rather than directly from Italy, though that is a reading rather than a settled matter; garnish-ravioli of that kind appear in the grande cuisine of the era as one more way to carry a salpicon into a soup tureen. The cross-referenced numbering — forcemeat, paste, stock, bechamel each with its own entry — is the mark of a brigade cookbook, written for a kitchen where those four things already stood ready on the bench.