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Oyster Broth, Chantilly
Open thirty-six medium, fresh oysters, place them in a stew pan with their own liquor, add one quart water, four branches well-cleaned celery, one teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, and boil for five minutes. Skim froth from surface, strain broth through a cheesecloth into six cups, but only three-quarters full. Beat up a gill thick cream to a stiff froth, evenly spread the cream over the six cups and serve.
N. B. Place the thirty-six oysters in a bowl and keep in ice-box for luncheon to-morrow.
A clear oyster broth crowned with unsweetened whipped cream — the "Chantilly" of the title. The oysters flavour the liquid and are then set aside, so the whole dish rests on how briefly they meet the heat.
- Five minutes is the whole cooking timeOysters toughen within a minute or two of boiling; here that is accepted because they are strained out and reserved, not served in the soup. If you intend to eat them in the bowl, poach them only until the edges ruffle and lift them out.
- A gill of creamHalf a cup, which whips to roughly a cup of froth — enough for a generous spoonful on each of six cups. Use heavy or whipping cream, unsweetened, whipped only to soft-stiff peaks so it floats rather than sinks.
- Two saltspoons cayenneA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is half a teaspoon of cayenne in five cups of broth — assertively hot by current tastes. A quarter teaspoon is a safer starting point, with more added at the end.
- Oyster liquor mattersStrain the liquor released on opening through a fine sieve to catch shell grit and add all of it; it carries most of the salinity. Hold back the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted, since shucked oysters vary widely in saltiness.
- Celery branches"Branches" means whole ribs, not heads. Four ribs with their leaves, bruised or split lengthwise, give the clean bitterness that keeps the cream from going flat; remove them with the oysters.
- StrainingDamp the cheesecloth first so it does not absorb broth, and let the liquid pass without pressing. Squeezing pushes fine sediment through and clouds a broth that is meant to look clear beneath the white cap.
- Yield and serviceSix cups, filled three-quarters so the cream has somewhere to sit — bouillon cups or small handled soup cups, served immediately, as the froth begins to weep within a few minutes.
- The reserved oystersThe note assumes a daily-emptied ice box. Cooked oysters keep covered and refrigerated for a day at most; drain them, cover, chill promptly, and discard any that smell other than sweet.
"Chantilly" in a kitchen context means whipped cream, a usage generally traced to the château of Chantilly north of Paris and current in French cooking by the nineteenth century; applied to a soup it signals a cap of unsweetened whipped cream floated on the surface, a garnish that turns up in the same period on purées and bisques. The dish belongs to the era when American hotel and club cookery leaned on cheap, abundant oysters — East Coast beds were still yielding them by the barrel in the 1900s — and when a cook could afford to boil three dozen for their flavour alone and set the flesh aside for the next day's luncheon. That frugal postscript is the most revealing line in the recipe, though nothing in the text itself tells us whether it originated in a professional kitchen or who the intended readers were.