Faust's Oyster Stew

Between the Civil War and WWI, Saint Louis was home to Tony Faust's Oyster House and Restaurant. Most of their recipes are lost but slave has recreated this one. We dedicate this dish to our LGBT Hero Noel Coward. Read more about him after the recipe. 

Back then oyster stew was fresh oysters simmered in a thickened cream, topped with a pat of butter. Often we have sacrificed the great tastes of the past on an alter made of kale or another such vegetable that a loving God never intended us to eat. Here slave has conferred with the ghosts of Tony Faust and Escoffier to produce classical taste with today's healthy standards and the availability of local supermarkets.

Ingredients

About a pint of oysters in liquid

2 cups seafood stock low sodium

1 cup clam juice

½ cup chopped shallots
1 garlic clove, minced

2 cans diced potatoes drained

1 can evaporated milk

1 tbs butter

1 tsp old bay seasonings

1 egg yolk

Directions:

Chop the shallots and mince the garlic. 

Heat the butter in a medium pot over medium heat. 

Add the onion and cook for about 2 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for about 30 seconds more.

Drain the oysters and add the liquid to the pot.
Add the seafood stock, and drained potatoes to the onion mixture and bring to a boil. 

Reduce the heat to medium and cook for about 10 minutes.

Puree the soup and blend until smooth. Add the can of evaporated milk. Taste test for salt, pepper and old bay.

Once this is nice and thick, add the oysters just before serving them so they “cook” on way to the table, also you could stir in an egg yolk.

Our music tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62knEI2NeMU

What a classic done with today's finesse to serve my Master Indy

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon

Noel Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (1899 – 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".

Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage debut at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set.

The leading actor-manager Charles Hawtrey, whom the young Coward idolized and from whom he learned a great deal about the theater, cast him in the children's play Where the Rainbow Ends.

In 1914, when Coward was fourteen, he became the protégé and probably the lover of Philip Streatfeild, a society painter. Streatfeild introduced him to Mrs Astley Cooper and her high society friends. Streatfeild died from tuberculosis in 1915, but Mrs Astley Cooper continued to encourage her late friend's student.

Coward performed during most of the First World War. In 1917, he appeared in The Saving Grace, a comedy. Coward recalled in his memoirs, "My part was reasonably large and I was really quite good in it, owing to the kindness and care of Hawtrey's direction. He took endless trouble with me ... and taught me during those two short weeks many technical points of comedy acting which I use to this day."

In 1924, Coward achieved his first great critical and financial success as a playwright with The Vortex. The story is about a nymphomaniac socialite and her cocaine-addicted son (played by Coward). Some saw the drugs as a mask for homosexuality. The Vortex was considered shocking in its day for its depiction of sexual vanity and drug abuse among the upper classes. Its notoriety and fiery performances attracted large audiences, justifying a move from a small suburban theatre to a larger one in the West End.

Coward, still having trouble finding producers, raised the money to produce the play himself. During the run of The Vortex, Coward met Jack Wilson, an American stockbroker (later a director and producer), who became his business manager and lover. Wilson used his position to steal from Coward, but the playwright was in love and accepted both the larceny and Wilson's heavy drinking.

The success of The Vortex in both London and America caused a great demand for new Coward plays. Hay Fever, the first of Coward's plays to gain an enduring place in the mainstream theatrical repertoire, appeared in 1925. It is a comedy about four egocentric members of an artistic family who casually invite acquaintances to their country house for the weekend and bemuse and enrage each other's guests. By the 1970s the play was recognised as a classic, described in The Times as a "dazzling achievement; like The Importance of Being Earnest, it is pure comedy with no mission but to delight, and it depends purely on the interplay of characters, not on elaborate comic machinery."

By June 1925 Coward had four shows running in the West End: The Vortex, Fallen Angels, Hay Fever and On with the Dance. Coward was turning out numerous plays and acting in his own works and others'. Soon, his frantic pace caught up with him, and he collapsed on stage in 1926 and had to take an extended rest, recuperating in Hawaii.

By 1929 Coward was one of the world's highest-earning writers, with an annual income of £50,000, more than £2,800,000 in terms of todays values. Coward thrived during the Great Depression, writing a succession of popular hits. Cavalcade (1931), about thirty years in the lives of two families, which required a huge cast, gargantuan sets and a complex hydraulic stage. Its 1933 film adaptation won the Academy Award for best picture.

With the outbreak of the Second World War Coward abandoned the theater and sought official war work. After running the British propaganda office in Paris, he worked on behalf of British intelligence. His task was to use his celebrity to influence American public and political opinion in favour of helping Britain.

Had the Germans invaded Britain, Coward was scheduled to be arrested and killed, as he was in The Black Book along with other figures such as Virginia Woolf, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, C. P. Snow and H. G. Wells. When this came to light after the war, Coward wrote: "I remember Rebecca West, who was one of the many who shared the honor with me, sent me a telegram which read: 'My dear – the people we should have been seen dead with'." 

Churchill's view was that Coward would do more for the war effort by entertaining the troops and the home front than by intelligence work: "Go and sing to them when the guns are firing – that's your job!" Coward, toured, acted, and sang all over Europe, Africa, Asia and America. His London home was wrecked by German bombs in 1941, and he took up temporary residence at the Savoy Hotel. During one air raid on the area around the Savoy he joined Carroll Gibbons and Judy Campbell in impromptu cabaret to distract the captive guests from their fears.

Coward's most enduring work from the war years was the hugely successful black comedy Blithe Spirit, about a novelist who researches the occult and hires a medium. A séance brings back the ghost of his first wife, causing havoc for the novelist and his second wife. With 1,997 consecutive performances, it broke box-office records for the run of a West End comedy, and was also produced on Broadway. The play was adapted into a 1945 film. Coward toured during 1942 in Blithe Spirit.

Coward's new plays after the war were moderately successful but failed to match the popularity of his pre-war hits.

In the 1950s he achieved fresh success as a cabaret performer, performing his own songs. In 1955 Coward's cabaret act at Las Vegas, recorded live, and released as Noël Coward at Las Vegas, was so successful that CBS engaged him to write and direct a series of three 90-minute television specials for the 1955–56 season. The first of these, Together With Music, paired Coward with Mary Martin, featuring him in many of the numbers from his Las Vegas act.

It was followed by productions of Blithe Spirit in which he starred with Claudette Colbert, Lauren Bacall and Mildred Natwick and This Happy Breed with Edna Best and Roger Moore.

Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onward. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theater repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theater works, screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography.

Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades.

Coward's plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. He did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, but it was discussed candidly after his death by biographers including Graham Payn, his long-time partner.

Coward was homosexual but, following the convention of his times, this was never publicly mentioned. Coward firmly believed his private business was not for public discussion, considering "any sexual activities when over-advertised" to be tasteless.

Even in the 1960s, Coward refused to acknowledge his sexual orientation publicly, wryly observing, "There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don't know." Despite this reticence, he encouraged his secretary Cole Lesley to write a frank biography once Coward was safely dead.

Coward's most important relationship, which began in the mid-1940s and lasted until his death, was with the South African stage and film actor Graham Payn. Coward featured Payn in several of his London productions. Payn later co-edited a collection of Coward's diaries, published in 1982. Coward's other relationships included the playwright Keith Winter, actors Louis Hayward and Alan Webb, his manager Jack Wilson and the composer Ned Rorem, who published details of their relationship in his diaries.

Coward had a 19-year friendship with Prince George, Duke of Kent, but biographers differ on whether it was platonic.

Payn believed that it was, although Coward reportedly admitted to the historian Michael Thornton that there had been "a little dalliance". Coward said, on the duke's death, "I suddenly find that I loved him more than I knew."

Coward maintained close friendships with many women, including the actresses Gertrude Lawrence, Judy Campbell; and "his loyal and lifelong amitié amoureuse", Marlene Dietrich.

By the end of the 1960s, Coward suffered from arteriosclerosis and he struggled with bouts of memory loss. He retired from acting. Coward was knighted in 1969 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. In 1972, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

Coward died at his home, Firefly Estate, in Jamaica in 1973 of heart failure and was buried there on the brow of Firefly Hill, overlooking the north coast of the island. On 28 March 1984 a memorial stone was unveiled by the Queen Mother in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. Thanked by Coward's partner, Graham Payn, for attending, the Queen Mother replied, "I came because he was my friend."

Coward always spelled his first name with the diæresis ("I didn't put the dots over the 'e' in Noël. The language did. Otherwise it's not Noël but Nool!").

"Why", asked Coward, "am I always expected to wear a dressing-gown, smoke cigarettes in a long holder and say 'Darling, how wonderful'?" The answer lay in his cultivation of a carefully crafted image. As a suburban boy who had been taken up by the upper classes he rapidly acquired the taste for high life: "I am determined to travel through life first class."

In 1969 he told Time magazine, "I acted up like crazy. I did everything that was expected of me. Part of the job." Time concluded, "Coward's greatest single gift has not been writing or composing, not acting or directing, but projecting a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise."

He could joke about his own immodesty: "My sense of my importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my sense of my own importance to myself is tremendous." When a Time interviewer apologised, "I hope you haven't been bored having to go through all these interviews for your [70th] birthday, having to answer the same old questions about yourself", Coward rejoined, "Not at all. I'm fascinated by the subject."