Oyster Soup

This seems the best of the four oyster soup recipes published in the Argus in 1928, but two of those recipes appeared in ads for "Oystero" - "a concentrated oyster powder made from fresh, clean, whole oysters by vacuum process". The first Argus recipe for real oyster soup calls for 18 fresh oysters, the second for 36.

Oyster Soup

18-24 fresh Sydney rock oysters
125 ml milk or 2 tablespoons cream
600 ml fish stock, or less stock and some milk

squeeze of lemon juice

1 teaspoon anchovy sauce, or 1 small anchovy finely chopped

30g butter

45g plain flour

cayenne

Melt the butter, add the flour, cook on a low heat for a minute. Add the stock gradually, stirring until it comes to the boil, reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes.

Remove from the heat, add the lemon juice, anchovy sauce and cream, and "as much cayenne as will cover a threepenny bit".

Put the oysters in soup bowls and pour the stock over. Serve with small thinly-sliced buttered sippets of toast. Serves 4 to 6.

Episode 10 - Death by Miss Adventure

This week's episode features Phryne Fisher as usual, but it isn't based on any of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher novels. The similar-sounding Death by Misadventure is an alternative title for Cocaine Blues, used by the U.S. publisher.

According to the ABC TV website, in Death by Miss Adventure Phryne investigates the death of a young female worker in a factory ‘accident’ and soon learns that the woman’s death might not be the misadventure the police think it is. Phryne's companion Dot is sent to the factory to work undercover as a tea-lady... It's a linking episode in which the killer suspected of abducting and murdering Phryne's sister comes back into the story. And there's a lesbian love triangle.

Since there's no actual novel to work with, this week's menu comes from Argus recipes published in April 1928. It's the sort of food a hard-working factory girl might enjoy:

Oyster Soup

Mutton (or Lamb) Pie

Quince Jelly and Cream

Episode 4 - Death at Victoria Dock

Phryne has a city girl's taste for veal. How else to explain the breaded veal cutlets in the Green Mill Murder, the veal cutlets she shares with her two adopted daughters early in this one and later Mrs B.'s production of roast veal with new potatoes and green salad for Phryne's dinner with her current lover, Peter Smith, a revolutionary and suspected anarchist. 

If Phryne had grown up on a dairy farm rather than the mean streets of Collingwood she would have seen the poddy calves flung into the back of a truck headed for the abattoir the morning after their birth. Further north, in beef cattle country, she would have heard the cows calling through the night after their calves were taken away and seen their wet eyes in the morning. If Phryne were a farmer's daughter, she wouldn't eat veal. And her "battle-scarred, sexy Slav" probably wouldn't either, if he was a true son of the earth.

So for Friday's menu I'm going off a revolutionary tangent to Russia, via France, with Boeuf a la Russe. Oysters are still on the menu and I'm afraid that, like Phyrne's cook Mrs B., I'm not big on desserts so it's quince fool again.