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Oyster Bouillon
Take thirty small oysters, drain and wash them, then pour over them a pint and a half of cold water. Let them come slowly to boiling point, using a double boiler, and let them simmer for thirty-five minutes. Drain and chop the oysters, and return them to the water and cook thirtyfive minutes longer in a double boiler. Strain through two thicknesses of cheese cloth, and add a little salt. A little cream should be added when just ready to serve. Serve in cups.
This is an extraction, not a stew: the long simmering that would ruin oysters in a chowder is here the whole point, since the oysters are strained out and discarded at the end. Read it as a shellfish broth and the odd instructions make sense.
- The hinge: the oysters are sacrificedSeventy minutes of simmering leaves the oysters themselves grey and rubbery, which is why they are strained away. Do not shorten the time hoping to eat them — the flavour has to move from the meat into the water, and that takes the full hour-plus.
- Why a double boilerThe insulated heat keeps the liquid at a bare tremble, below a rolling boil; the recipe is explicit that it should come to the boiling point slowly. Hard boiling is generally held to cloud a broth of this kind and to coarsen its delicate marine flavour. If you have no double boiler, use the lowest burner setting with a heat diffuser and check that the surface only shivers.
- Thirty small oystersSomewhere in the region of a pint of shucked oysters, though thirty small ones may well come to less; a pint weighs roughly a pound. Modern shucked oysters sold in tubs are often larger than the small oysters the recipe seems to assume, so measure by volume rather than counting to thirty.
- Do not wash away the liquorThe instruction to drain and wash may reflect oysters that arrived gritty from the shell. Bottled or tubbed oysters today come in their own liquor, which is the most flavourful part of the dish — strain it through cheesecloth for grit and add it to the water instead of pouring it off.
- A pint and a half of waterThree cups. Expect some reduction over the two long simmers, and further loss in the oysters you strain away, so the finished bouillon will be appreciably less than you started with.
- StrainingTwo thicknesses of cheesecloth in a sieve, undisturbed — let it drip rather than pressing the solids, or the broth turns cloudy. A coffee filter or fine muslin does the same job.
- Salt and cream at the endOysters are already saline and the broth concentrates as it cooks, so season only after straining, as the recipe directs. 'A little cream' is left undefined; a spoonful or two per cup is enough, stirred in off the heat, since the recipe wants it added only when just ready to serve and a salty broth can make cream separate if boiled.
- Yield and serviceAbout four small servings in bouillon cups or teacups, as a first course. It is meant to be sipped, so serve it hot but not scalding. A dusting of paprika or cayenne is optional; the recipe itself calls for none.
Bouillons occupy their own chapter in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks because they were understood as much as restoratives as food — served in handled cups to invalids, to convalescents, and to guests at the start of a long dinner or late in the evening after cards. Oysters were the obvious raw material on the eastern seaboard, where they were still cheap and abundant enough to be boiled for an hour and then thrown away for their flavour alone. The technique of drawing out flavour into water and clarifying it through cheesecloth is straight from the French kitchen vocabulary that American cookery writers were busily domesticating, and the word bouillon itself carried a certain refinement that "oyster broth" would not.