Oyster Soup
(A French recipe.) Drain 1 quart of oysters and season with salt, pepper, a blade of mace, a bayleaf, and 1 ounce butter. Add 1/2 pint of white stock and cook fifteen minutes. Remove the oysters and herbs, and to the stock add the juice of the oysters and 1 pint of hot milk, the yolk of 1 egg, some parsley, and a blending of flour and butter. Put in the oysters, and after stirring a few moments serve hot.
A straightforward oyster velouté, but the timing in the first step is the one thing to change.
- The fifteen minutesOysters need about two minutes in hot liquid — just until the edges ruffle and they plump. Fifteen minutes turns them to rubber. Poach them in the seasoned stock briefly, lift them out with a slotted spoon, and let the aromatics steep in the liquid for the remaining time instead.
- White stockA pale unbrowned stock of veal or chicken bones with no coloured vegetables. A light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- A blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, and a "blade" is one dried piece. If you only have ground mace, a pinch is enough, but it will not strain out — add it at the end rather than steeping it.
- MeasuresA quart of shucked oysters may be anywhere from about two dozen large ones to fifty or more small; in US measure half a pint of stock is one cup and a pint of milk is two. The oyster liquor adds another cup or so, which is why the stock quantity looks small.
- Save the liquor"Drain" here does not mean discard. The juice goes back in later and carries most of the flavour, so strain it through a fine sieve to catch shell grit.
- The blending of flour and butterEqual weights of soft butter and flour kneaded together — beurre manié. Whisk it into the simmering soup in small pieces and let it cook a couple of minutes so the flour loses its raw taste. Start with about a tablespoon of each for this volume.
- The egg yolkTemper it: whisk a ladleful of the hot liquid into the beaten yolk, then return the mixture to the pan off the boil. Added straight to hot soup it will scramble into threads.
- YieldRoughly four to six servings as a first course. Serve immediately — reheating cooks the oysters a second time and can split the yolk-thickened base.
Labelling this "a French recipe" in an English-language cookbook of the period signalled technique rather than origin: the egg-yolk liaison, the beurre manié finish, and the pale unbrowned stock belong to the vocabulary of French professional cookery as codified in the nineteenth century. Oyster soups in plainer household books of the same era are often just oysters, milk, butter and crackers; this version borrows the restaurant vocabulary and, with it, the assumption that a cook has white stock standing by. National labels in collections of this kind are often loose, and are better read as a claim about style than as documented provenance.