Home › Croquettes, Etc › Oyster Patties
Oyster Patties
Take as many oysters as you have patties, stew them in their own liquor, cut in pieces, add a teaspoonful of flour, salt and pepper, butter the size of a large walnut, little grated lemon peel, to about one dozen. Add to the oysters three spoonfuls of good cream, little mace, mix well, fill the patty shells, and serve.
A thin oyster ragout spooned into pre-baked pastry shells. The recipe assumes you already have the shells and already know that oysters cook in seconds, so both of those need saying.
- Do not stew the oystersOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and the liquor turns opaque, about a minute at a bare simmer. Lift them out with a slotted spoon, then reduce and thicken the liquor separately, or you will be serving rubber in pastry.
- Butter the size of a large walnutA standard 19th-century measure of roughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. It is stated for a dozen oysters, as is the teaspoon of flour.
- Three spoonfuls of creamGenuinely ambiguous. Unqualified "spoonfuls" in books of this period usually mean tablespoons, which gives about 3 tablespoons of heavy cream per dozen oysters, but the recipe gives no basis for certainty. Add it gradually and stop when the mixture coats a spoon.
- Patty shellsThese were bought or made as puff-paste cases, what a French kitchen calls bouchées or vol-au-vent. Frozen puff pastry shells, baked and the centres hollowed out, are the direct modern equivalent. Bake them ahead and fill only at the moment of serving or the bottoms go soft.
- One oyster per pattyThat is what "as many oysters as you have patties" means, and it is lean by modern taste. Two or three medium oysters per shell makes a more generous filling; scale the flour, butter, cream and seasoning to the dozen as the recipe does.
- MaceThe dried aril that surrounds the nutmeg seed; generally described as close to nutmeg but sharper and less sweet. Ground mace is still sold; a scant pinch per dozen oysters is plenty, as it can dominate in quantity.
- Lemon peelGrate only the coloured zest. The white pith underneath is bitter and there is nothing here to hide it.
- YieldA dozen oysters with this sauce fills anywhere from four to twelve small shells, depending on shell size and how generously you fill them. Serve hot, as a first course or as part of a buffet.
Oyster patties belong to a long American run of oyster cookery that peaked in the second half of the 19th century, when rail and ice made Chesapeake and Long Island Sound oysters cheap far inland and they turned up scalloped, fried, in soup, in stuffing and in pastry. The dish is a shortcut version of a French bouchee: a baked puff-paste case filled at the last moment with something creamy and rich. It sits in the same family as croquettes, made dishes in which a small quantity of expensive protein is bound in a thick sauce and dressed up to look like more than it is. Patty shells could be bought ready-made from bakers, and puff paste is tedious to make at home, which may be why this recipe simply assumes you have some.