Oyster Soup
To one quart, or twenty-five oysters, add a half pint of water. Put the oysters on the fire in the liquor. The moment it begins to simmer (not boil, for that would shrivel the oysters), pour it through a colander into a hot dish, leaving the oysters in the colander. Now put into the saucepan two tablespoonfuls of butter, when it bubbles, sprinkle in a tablespoonful of sifted flour; let the soup cook a few moments, beating it well with the egg-whisk; then add to it gradually the oyster juice, and half a pint of good cream (which has been brought to a boil in another vessel), add the oysters, season carefully with cayenne pepper and salt. An oyster soup is made with thickening; an oyster stew is made without it.
A plain velvet-textured oyster soup that depends on one thing: the oysters are heated twice, briefly, and never boiled. Everything else is a butter-and-flour base thinned with the oysters' own liquor and scalded cream.
- The hinge: no boiling, everThe oysters go on the heat only until the liquor twitches, then come straight out. Boiled oysters tighten, weep and go rubbery within a minute; returned to the finished soup they need only to warm through off the heat.
- A quart of oystersThis means shucked oysters with their liquor, not oysters in the shell — about 4 cups, and 25 medium oysters is a fair count. Shucked oysters are still sold by the pint and quart.
- Half a pintOne cup, both for the water and for the cream. The finished soup comes to roughly a quart and a half; the recipe states no number of servings.
- Two tablespoons butter, one of flourThat is a loose roux by modern proportions; a single tablespoon of flour in this quantity of liquid gives only a light body, well short of a chowder. Cook it a minute or two over moderate heat without colouring, or the soup tastes of raw flour.
- Strain, and mean itOyster liquor carries sand and bits of shell. Pour it through the colander lined with a fine sieve or a doubled square of muslin, and hold the strained juice hot so it does not chill the base when added.
- Scalding the cream separatelyThe instruction is not fussiness. Cold cream tipped into the hot base would chill the soup and check the thickening; bringing it to a bare boil in its own pan avoids that.
- Seasoning"Carefully" is the operative word — oyster liquor is already saline, so salt at the very end. Cayenne is what the recipe specifies; white pepper will do instead.
- FreshnessUse oysters from a reliable source and keep them cold until they go in the pot. Anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised should be aware that a brief simmer of this kind is a light cooking, not a thorough one.
American oyster cookery in the nineteenth century was cheap cookery: oysters came up the coast and inland by rail and barrel in enormous quantities, and soups, stews, fries and scallops of them appeared in household manuals throughout the period. This entry's closing sentence is the useful part, and the reason it earns a page in a general-purpose cook book — it settles a distinction cooks argued over then and still do, that a stew is oysters in seasoned milk or cream, while a soup carries flour. The technique of pulling the oysters out at the first tremble of the liquor, then reuniting them with the finished liquid, is the same method still used in oyster bars, and it survives because it gets the oysters hot without ruining them.