Oyster Sauce
Make a nice drawn butter with half cupful butter, one tablespoonful flour, one cupful milk, a little salt; when boiled and thickened, add oysters-as many as you please. Let cook until the oysters curl at the edges. Serve with boiled turkey or chicken pie.
A simple white sauce enriched with oysters, meant to be ladled over boiled poultry. The only real difficulty is knowing when to stop cooking.
- Stop at the curlThe instruction to cook "until the oysters curl at the edges" is the whole recipe. In a sauce at a bare simmer that takes about one to two minutes; past three the oysters tighten into rubber and shed liquor that thins the sauce.
- Drawn butterIn this period "drawn butter" means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not the clarified butter served with lobster today. Melt the butter, cook the flour in it a minute without colouring, then whisk in the milk.
- The butter is generousHalf a cup of butter to one tablespoon of flour will not emulsify neatly; expect a rich, loose, slightly separated sauce. Using two tablespoons of flour gives a more stable modern result.
- Oyster liquorDrain the shucked oysters and add a few tablespoons of their liquor with the milk. It carries most of the flavour, and it also lets you salt accurately, since the liquor is already salty.
- Quantity"As many as you please" leaves this to the cook; about a cup of shucked oysters suits this quantity of sauce, which will stretch over a boiled bird for several people.
- Buying oystersShucked oysters in liquor from the fish counter work as well as freshly opened ones here. They should smell of clean sea water and the liquor should be clear, not cloudy.
- ServingKeep the sauce hot but off direct heat once the oysters go in; reheating cooks them a second time. Make it after the turkey comes out of its pot and serve immediately.
Oyster sauce for boiled poultry is a fixture of nineteenth-century American and English cookery, and oysters were then cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans. Boiled turkey — a dish now nearly extinct — was commonly sent to table with oyster or celery sauce, since plain simmered poultry needs something assertive alongside it. The sauce belongs to the family of flour-thickened "drawn butters" that were central to English-descended sauce cookery before French velouté and béchamel vocabulary took hold in American kitchens. Note that this has nothing to do with the bottled Cantonese oyster sauce sold under the same name, which is a reduced, caramelised oyster extract of an entirely separate tradition.