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Oyster Broth Tomate
Prepare oyster broth, pour in a gill tomato sauce, boil five minutes, pour it into six cups and serve.
A two-line finishing recipe that assumes you already have a pot of oyster broth on the stove; almost everything that matters is in the broth you bring to it.
- The hinge: keep the oysters out of the boilBoiling for five minutes is best applied to the broth rather than to whole oysters. Oysters toughen with sustained boiling, so if any are still in the pot, poach them only until the edges ruffle, lift them out, and return them to the cups at the end.
- A gillHalf a US cup, 4 fl oz. An older British or Irish text may mean 5 fl oz; in a soup of this size the difference is immaterial.
- What the oyster broth isIn books of this period it means oysters and their liquor simmered with water or milk, seasoned with a little mace or celery, then strained. Bottled clam juice thinned with light stock is the nearest modern shortcut, though it is saltier.
- Tomato sauce, 1900 senseNot pasta sauce. A period tomato sauce was typically sieved tomato, often thickened with a light roux and seasoned, closer to a thin tomato veloute. Passata simmered briefly with a knob of butter gives roughly the right body and acidity.
- Watch curdling if the broth is milk-basedTomato acid will split a milk or cream broth. Add the sauce off a hard boil, stir it in gradually, and hold the pot below a simmer once combined.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is already salty and reduces further over five minutes. Season only after the tomato sauce is in and the soup has finished cooking.
- YieldSix cups as written. These are almost certainly serving cups rather than US measuring cups, though the recipe gives no size. Treat it as a first course for six.
Oyster broths and "oyster soups" ran through American and European cookery of the late nineteenth century, when oysters were still cheap urban food shipped inland by rail and barrel, and a clear oyster liquor was a standard opening to a formal dinner. The construction here is thoroughly of the professional kitchen: a mother sauce held ready in one pot, a broth in another, combined to order and given a French-style name with the garnish appended.