Oyster Stew
1 quart oysters 1/4 cup butter 1/8 tablespoon pepper 1/2 tablespoon salt cup butter tablespoon salt tablespoon pepper Clean the oysters by placing in colander and pouring over them 3/4 cup cold water. Pick over carefully, removing any bits of shell that adhere. Reserve liquid, heat to boiling point, strain through double cheesecloth over wire strainer. Add oysters, cook until edges begin to curl. Add oysters and liquor to hot, scalded milk; add butter and seasoning. Serve at once.
Paprika, celery salt, onion juice, parsley or mace may be used as additional seasoning, if desired.
For oyster soup, thicken the milk, using 1/2 tablespoon flour for each cup of milk. Prepare as for white sauce.
Good beef is dark, purple in color when first cut, but turns to a bright red. It should be well streaked with a firm fat of yellowish color that . It should be well streaked with a firm fat of yellowish color that crumbles easily. The flesh should be firm and, when pressed with the finger, no mark should remain.
Veal should be pink; it is usually less firm than beef. If used too young, it is watery and flabby.
Mutton should be dullish red, rather firm and streaked with firm white or slightly yellow fat.
Lamb, which is in season between May and November, should be pink, with more red color in the bones than mutton.
Pork should be pale in color. It is less firm than beef and has soft fat. All meat should be removed from the paper wrappings as soon as it comes from the market. Paper absorbs meat juices, and if meat remains in the paper too long, it will taste of the paper. Before cooking, meat should be wiped with a clean, damp cloth, but it should never be put in water because water draws out the meat juices. Meat should always be kept in a cool place.
One of the fundamental, underlying principles in the cooking of meat is that heat hardens protein.
High temperature hardens and toughens meat; therefore, it should only be used to form a coating or to sear the meat on the outside. This also is the best means of retaining the juices, and if lower temperature is used to complete the cooking, the finished product will not be tough and indigestible.
Pounding and chopping helps to break the connective tissue. It is, however, likely to open the thread-like meat fibers and release the juices, If flour is pounded into the meat, it will hold and help retain the juices. The natural flavor of tougher meats is developed by long, slow cooking. TIME TABLE FOR ROASTING (PER POUND) Beef, round.
Beef ribs (well done).
Beef ribs (rare)..
Mutton, leg (well done) Mutton, leg (rare)...
Mutton loin (rare) Mutton, shoulder (stuffed) Lamb (well done)...
Veal (well done) Pork (well done). 10 to 12 minutes 12 to 15 minutes 8 to 10 minutes 15 minutes 8 minutes 8 minutes 15 minutes 20 minutes 25 minutes 30 minutes Chicken.
Duck..
Goose.
Turkey, 8-pound. 15 minutes 20 to 25 minutes 18 to 20 minutes 15 to 20 minutes
A plain milk stew that depends almost entirely on not overcooking the oysters. The ingredient line has lost its quantities, so work from proportions rather than the list as printed.
- Working proportionsPeriod oyster stews commonly run somewhere around 1 pint shucked oysters with their liquor to 1 quart milk, though proportions vary from book to book. The printed line reads "cup butter", so the missing figure is a fraction of a cup, probably 1/4 cup. The salt and pepper amounts are likewise incomplete — a full tablespoon of each would be far too much for a quart of milk.
- The hinge: edges curl and stopOysters are done the moment the frilled edge ruffles, roughly one to two minutes in their own hot liquor. Held longer, or allowed to boil in the milk, they shrink and turn rubbery. Combine and serve immediately rather than keeping the pot warm.
- Do not boil the milk"Hot, scalded milk" means brought just to the point where the surface shivers and a skin forms, about 180F. A hard boil, especially after the acidic oyster liquor goes in, will make the milk curdle and separate.
- Straining the liquorThe double cheesecloth step is not fussiness. Oyster liquor carries fine grit and shell fragments that no amount of picking over will catch, and heating it to boiling first makes the sediment easier to leave behind.
- Rinsing waterThe "4 cup cold water" for rinsing is a lost fraction; about 1/4 cup is enough for a pint of oysters. Use as little as possible, since any water you pour over them dilutes the liquor you are about to build the stew on.
- The soup variationFor oyster soup, 1/2 tablespoon flour per cup of milk gives a very thin binding. Cook the flour in the butter for a minute or two before adding milk, as for white sauce, or the stew will taste pasty.
- Yield and servingA pint of oysters and a quart of milk serves four generously as a first course, two or three as a supper. Oyster crackers or plain saltines are the period accompaniment.
- Buying oystersShucked oysters sold in tubs come packed in their own liquor and are what this recipe assumes. Buy them refrigerated, use them within a day or two, and discard any with an off or sour smell.
Oyster stew of this kind, milk, butter, oysters and almost nothing else, was one of the most widely eaten hot dishes in American cities through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, when barrels of Chesapeake and Long Island oysters were cheap enough to be everyday food rather than a luxury. Oyster cellars and saloons sold it by the bowl, and it became fixed in home cooking as a Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving dish in many regions, a custom often traced to Irish Catholic immigrants substituting oysters for the ling cod of a meatless vigil supper. The list of optional seasonings here, paprika, celery salt, onion juice, parsley, mace, is the sort of variation list common in general cookbooks of the period, which liked to offer a single base recipe with alternatives attached. Mace was a long-established English seasoning for oysters, paired with them in print since at least the eighteenth century.