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Boston Oyster Stew
Open thirty-six large box oysters, place in a saucepan with their own liquor and a pint fresh oyster juice extra; add a pint water, four branches well-cleaned celery, one teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne, place on the fire and boil for five minutes; remove the celery, skim the scum from the surface, add one pint hot milk, one gill cream and one ounce good butter, mix well, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve with six freshly prepared toasts separately.
A plain oyster stew that stands or falls on one point: how long the oysters spend in the pot. Everything else is a matter of substitution.
- The five-minute boilFive minutes at a boil will shrink and toughen the oysters. Bring the liquor, water and celery to a simmer, cook the celery for the five minutes, then drop the oysters in and hold them just until their edges ruffle, one to two minutes off the boil.
- Box oysters"Box oysters" was a period trade term whose sense is not settled; it may refer to oysters sold by the box rather than to shucked oysters sold loose, and the recipe's own instruction to "open" them suggests they arrived in the shell. Buy a quart of shucked oysters with their liquor; thirty-six large ones is roughly that.
- Extra oyster juiceA pint of "fresh oyster juice" would have been bought loose from a fishmonger. Substitute the liquor drained from your own oysters plus bottled clam juice to make up the volume.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon, which is assertive. A gill is half a cup.
- Branches of celeryA branch here is a single rib, not a whole head. Four ribs, left long and lifted out whole before the dairy goes in.
- Adding the dairyScald the milk and cream separately and add them off the heat. Poured cold into hot oyster liquor they can curdle, and reboiling the stew afterwards undoes the short cooking of the oysters.
- Yield and serviceSix servings, matching the six toasts. Warm the tureen and the bowls; a milk-based stew in cold china goes lukewarm within a minute.
Oyster stew of this kind was everyday food along the American Atlantic coast through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap, abundant and sold shucked by the quart from carts and cellar saloons in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The style is deliberately spare: liquor, milk, butter, pepper, and nothing that competes with the oyster, which is why the celery is treated as a flavouring to be removed rather than a vegetable to be eaten. The recipe also records a food economy that has largely gone: buying a pint of loose oyster juice as a separate item assumes a fishmonger shucking oysters in quantity all day long.