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Bisque of Oysters
Boil in a saucepan one quart and a half water, add forty-eight medium freshly opened oysters with their liquor and let boil for ten minutes; shift the pan to the corner of the range. Have in a small saucepan one and a half ounces butter, add two and a half ounces sifted flour, mix thoroughly with a whisk for a minute, then add three-quarters of a pint hot milk and strain in the broth of the oysters. Season with two light teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Briskly mix with the whisk for five minutes, then let slowly boil for ten minutes.
Beat up two egg yolks with a gill cold cream and add it to the bisque, adding also half ounce butter in small bits. Place the pan on a table and mix well until the butter is thoroughly dissolved. Cut each oyster in half and place them in a hot soup tureen; then strain the bisque through a clean cheesecloth into the tureen and serve.
A classic velouté-style shellfish soup that is sound in structure but badly out of step with modern practice on one point: the oysters. Everything else is straightforward conversion.
- The hinge: do not boil the oysters ten minutesOysters firm up in well under two minutes in hot liquid and turn to erasers after that. Poach them just until the edges ruffle, lift them out, and let the liquor and water go on simmering to make the broth — the flavor extraction the original wanted happens in the broth, not in the flesh.
- Egg-and-cream liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not return to a boil or it will curdle. Temper a ladle of hot soup into the yolks first, then stir the mixture back in off the heat, exactly as the direction to "place the pan on a table" intends.
- "Shift the pan to the corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the coolest spot. It means reduce to the barest simmer or pull the pan off the burner entirely.
- Weights to volumes1½ oz butter is 3 tablespoons; the additional ½ oz is 1 tablespoon. 2½ oz sifted flour is roughly ⅔ cup — more flour than butter by weight, so a stiff roux, though spread through roughly two quarts of liquid it gives a moderately thickened soup rather than a very thick one.
- Gills, pints and saltspoonsA gill is ½ cup; ¾ pint is 1½ cups (American measure). A saltspoon is ¼ teaspoon, so the seasoning is ½ teaspoon cayenne and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg.
- Salt and cayenneTwo teaspoons of salt goes into a soup already carrying the oyster liquor; with today's oysters and any commercial stock it is easy to overshoot. Add half, then correct at the end. Half a teaspoon of cayenne in this volume will read as noticeably hot to most modern palates.
- StrainingCheesecloth catches shell grit and any bits of coagulated egg. A fine chinois does the same job faster, but strain the soup over the halved oysters in the tureen as written so they warm through without cooking further.
- YieldForty-eight oysters and something over two quarts of liquid gives eight to ten first-course servings.
The International Cook Book came out of the professional dining rooms of turn-of-the-century New York, and this recipe shows it: oysters by the four dozen, a roux built in a separate pan, a yolk-and-cream liaison finished off the heat, and service from a tureen. Oysters were cheap and enormously abundant in American coastal cities through the nineteenth century, which is why oyster soups, stews, pies and fries fill the period cookbooks in a way they no longer do — the great New York beds were fished out and polluted into closure within a generation of this book's publication. The word bisque is generally traced to the Bay of Biscay or to bis cuit, "twice cooked," though neither derivation is settled; by 1900 it had come to mean a smooth, thickened, cream-enriched shellfish soup, and the strained finish here is what separates a bisque from an oyster stew.