Home › Some Useful Recipes › Improved Frying-Pan-Handle Always Oval
Improved Frying-Pan-Handle Always Oval
XVIII. Prepared Dishes Baked.
Oysters. This is a nice breakfast dish. Separate the oysters from the liquor, and put some of them in a baking platter, or pan. Make a seasoning of grated bread-crumbs, pepper, salt, celery-seed and small bits of butter. Put this over the oysters, add some seasoning and again oysters until you have enough. Pour a glass of wine or sound cider over all, and add the liquor of the oysters, as much as may be necessary. Bake until hot throughout and serve immediately. Meat Pot-Pie. The old-fashioned way of making a pot-pie, and the only way in which the lower crust can be properly browned, is to use a thick round-bottomed pot over an open fire. The bottom and sides of the pot are lined with thick crust, and just before the pie is done the fire is increased until the crust is well browned. It cannot be made in a flat-bottomed or thin kettle. The modern way of making a potpie in the oven is to brown the top crust. It is the next best thing to a browned bottom crust. Chicken, game, beef and veal are the meats used. XIX. Pastry for Meat Pies.
MANY prefer a crust that is firm enough to be raised around the meat. Care must be taken that the flour is dry, and it must be sifted. Boil water with a very little lard and an equal quantity of sweet drippings or butter. While hot, mix this with as much flour as you want, making the paste very smooth and stiff, by beating and kneading. When ready, place it in a cloth or under a pan until cold. To make the form, place the left hand on the lump of crust, and with the right keep working it up the back of the hand until the proper shape is obtained. It must be thick enough to support itself.
When worked into the desired form, the meat is put in with the necessary dressing, and the cover cemented on with the white of an egg, leaving vent holes for the escape of steam. You will have difficulty in forming the paste without practice, and in reality these raised pies are more fanciful than practical. Before putting into the oven the whole must be glazed with white of eggs.
Three items are run together here: a layered baked oyster dish, a discussion of pot-pie crusts that is commentary rather than method, and a hot-water raised paste. Only the first and third can be cooked from as written, and both leave quantities to the cook.
- The hinge: bake briefly and hotOysters shed liquid and toughen fast. The book gives no time or temperature; "bake until hot throughout" need be no more than a short spell in a hot oven — roughly 15 minutes at 400F for a shallow dish, until the edges of the oysters just ruffle. Longer and they shrink in their own liquor.
- "Baking platter"A shallow oval earthenware or metal dish. Keep the layers shallow — two of oysters and two of crumbs at most — or the middle will still be cold when the top is browned.
- No oven temperature is givenNone can be inferred from the text. A modern 400F suits the dish; the point is to set the crumbs and heat the oysters, not to cook them through slowly.
- Quantities are left to youA reasonable working version: 1 pint shucked oysters, 1 cup dry crumbs, 4 tablespoons butter in small bits, 1/2 teaspoon celery seed, salt and pepper, and 1/4 cup wine or cider. That serves two to three at breakfast or four as a starter.
- "Grated bread-crumbs"Dry crumbs grated from stale bread on a hand grater — coarser and drier than commercial fine crumbs, closer to panko in behaviour. Panko or coarse homemade crumbs will crisp; fine packaged crumbs turn to paste in the oyster liquor.
- "Sound cider"Cider that has not turned to vinegar. It could mean hard or sweet cider depending on the household; dry hard cider or a dry white wine both work here. Sweet apple juice will make the dish cloying.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through a fine sieve for grit before adding, and add sparingly — enough to moisten the bottom layer only. Too much and the crumbs float rather than brown.
- The pot-pie paragraph is not a recipeIt describes why a round-bottomed pot over an open fire browns a bottom crust and a flat kettle will not. Useful context, no quantities, no method. Treat it as an aside.
- The raised crustThis is hot-water paste: boiling water and fat beaten into sifted flour, rested until cold, then moulded by hand. The book's own proportions are vague, and hot-water crust ratios vary. Its warning that these pies are "more fanciful than practical" is honest — the book itself admits you will have difficulty forming the paste without practice.
- Egg-white glazeBrushing raw white on before baking gives a hard shine and helps seal the lid. It cooks in the oven, so there is no raw-egg concern in the finished pie.
Baked or "scalloped" oysters in layers with buttered crumbs were breakfast and supper food across the nineteenth-century United States, when oysters were cheap, shucked by the quart and sold from barrels and street carts in every eastern city; a household book of the period could assume its reader had a pint of them and no particular reverence for the fact. The celery seed is often taken as a period marker — before celery salt was a shelf staple, seed is said to have carried that flavour into oyster dishes, stuffings and pickles. The raised pie paste that follows belongs to a much older English tradition, in which the hot-water crust is traditionally described as much a container as a food: pies were moulded by hand or in wooden shapes, filled with meat, and the crust is generally said to have served to hold and preserve the contents rather than to be eaten with pleasure. The author's admission that such pies are "more fanciful than practical" catches the moment when they had already passed out of ordinary use into showpiece cookery. The odd title on this page — a frying-pan-handle notice — is most likely a stray line from the advertising and hardware matter these compendia bound in among their recipes.