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Delicious Oyster Bouillon
Wash and chop fine fifty good sized oysters, put them in a double boiler, and cover and cook slowly for an hour; add a pint of water, a saltspoon of celery seed, and strain through two thicknesses of cheese cloth; reheat, add a tablespoonful of butter, a little salt and serve in cups.
A clear oyster broth of the type served at the start of a formal dinner, in cups rather than bowls. The long cooking is deliberate extraction, not a mistake, but the result stands or falls on how hard you strain it.
- What fifty oysters meansFifty good-sized shucked oysters is somewhere in the region of a quart to a quart and a half of oysters with their liquor. Note that the recipe opens by telling you to wash them, which will carry off part of the liquor that holds much of the flavor.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Celery seed is assertive, so a quarter teaspoon in a pint of liquid is about right and more will dominate.
- The double boiler is the pointSimmering chopped oysters directly over heat risks scorching and clouding the broth. Held over water the contents stay below boiling, so the oysters give up their liquor gently instead of seizing hard against the pan. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up over the hour.
- Why an hour does no harm hereAn hour would ruin oysters you intended to eat, but these are sacrificed for their liquor and thrown away at the straining. The spent meat is textureless and can go to the stockpot or the bin.
- StrainingTwo layers of cheesecloth in a fine sieve, set over a bowl, and let it drip rather than squeezing. Pressing the pulp forces fine particles through and turns a clear bouillon murky. Rinse the cloth in cold water and wring it before use so it does not absorb flavor.
- Salt with careOyster liquor is already saline. Season only after the pint of water goes in and the broth is reheated.
- Reheat, do not boilBring the strained broth just to steaming; a hard boil throws up scum and dulls the flavor. Add the butter at the end, accepting that in a clear broth it will mostly sit as a sheen.
- YieldPerhaps a pint and a half of finished bouillon, or four to five small cupfuls. Serve immediately; it flattens on standing.
Bouillon in an American cookbook of this period meant a clear, ungarnished broth taken from a two-handled cup, often at the start of dinner or handed round at receptions and after skating parties, where it filled the role tea or cocktails later took. Oysters were the obvious base for it: the East Coast beds were still enormously productive, shucked oysters were cheap enough to spend fifty of them on a pint and a half of broth, and oyster stews, panned oysters and oyster soups appear all through household manuals of the period. The double boiler in the instructions is a long-established piece of domestic equipment, making gentle indirect cooking a normal technique rather than an improvisation with two pots. Within a few decades pollution, overharvesting and disease had thinned the beds badly, and a recipe that treats fifty oysters as a flavoring agent to be strained out and discarded reads now as a record of a vanished abundance.