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Broiled Oysters A La Creme
One pint of fine oysters, one small tablespoon of butter, one egg, finelypowdered cracker, very little flour; beat the egg; season the oyster with pepper and salt. When the oysters have been well drained dip each one in the egg, and roll in crumbs and broil over a brisk fire; scald the milk; mix a little cold water with the flour, having it smooth, and add it to the milk. As soon as the milk comes to a boil, pour it over the oysters and serve very hot.
A simple oyster dish with a flaw in the transcription: the cream sauce calls for scalded milk that never appears in the ingredient list. Plan on about a cup for a pint of oysters.
- The missing milkThe ingredients name butter, egg, cracker crumbs and flour, but the method scalds milk. Use roughly 1 cup whole milk (or half milk, half cream) thickened with the "very little flour" — about 1 tablespoon slaked in cold water.
- Timing is the hingeOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they plump — 1 to 2 minutes a side under a hot broiler. Any longer and they shrink and turn to rubber, and no amount of sauce will rescue them.
- "Broil over a brisk fire"This means a bare grate over live coals, close to the heat. A modern broiler set to high with the rack in the top position, or a very hot cast-iron pan, gives the same result; the crumb coat should brown before the oyster overcooks.
- Drain them hardWet oysters will not hold egg and crumbs. Spread them on a towel for a few minutes, then blot the tops — this is the difference between a crust and a paste.
- Powdered crackerNineteenth-century recipes mean soda or water crackers crushed fine, not seasoned breadcrumbs. Unsalted saltines pounded in a bag are the closest thing; season them yourself, since the oyster liquor is already saline.
- Where the butter goesThe tablespoon of butter is unassigned in the text. Melt it into the scalded milk with the flour to make the sauce, or brush it over the crumbed oysters before broiling; either reading is consistent with the period.
- Sauce consistencyAdd the flour-and-water slurry to milk already hot, whisk, and let it boil a full minute to lose the raw starch taste. It should coat a spoon thinly — this is a pouring sauce, not a gravy.
- YieldA pint of shucked oysters is somewhere around 16 to 25 depending on size, enough for three or four as a first course, two as a supper on toast.
Recipes like this belong to the American oyster century, when the beds of Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound supplied barrels of shucked oysters by rail to inland cities, and oysters were cheap enough to be everyday food. Household cookbooks of the period commonly gave a run of oyster preparations together — fried, scalloped, panned, broiled, stewed, in patties — because the ingredient was cheap and universal rather than a luxury. "A la crème" here is the plain nineteenth-century sense of the phrase: served in a white sauce, the same milk-and-flour foundation that a period cook would have made constantly. The overfishing that later collapsed those beds and made oysters expensive again was already underway by the late nineteenth century.