Home › Fish, Oysters, Etc › Steamed Oysters
Steamed Oysters
Choose the best oysters; place in a vegetable dish; season well with salt, pepper and butter. Steam over boiling water, where they should remain until they begin to curl. OYSTERS A LA CRÊME.
Wash the oysters from the liquor; place them in a saucepan; season with salt, pepper, very little butter; when the edges of the oysters are curled, dust with little flour. Have ready some hot cream (not boiled), about one pint of thick cream is sufficient for quart of oysters. When oysters are done, add to them the cream, and pour over slices of toasted bread. Serve at once, and very hot.
Two short oyster dishes that share one governing rule: the curled edge is the finish line, not a stage along the way. Both are the work of about five minutes once the oysters are shucked.
- The hinge: curling edgesShucked oysters are done the moment the frilled mantle ruffles and the flesh firms, roughly two to three minutes. Held longer they contract into rubber and weep out the liquor that should be the sauce.
- "A vegetable dish"A shallow serving dish of china or metal, often supplied with a cover, set inside the steamer so the oysters cook in their own liquor rather than losing it to the water. Any shallow heatproof dish that fits your steamer basket will do the same job.
- Oysters by the quartOysters were sold shucked by liquid measure. A quart is a little under a litre. Buy them in tubs with their liquor, not drained.
- "Wash the oysters from the liquor"This meant rinsing off grit and shell fragments, a real concern with hand-shucked oysters delivered in bulk. Tubbed oysters today need only a quick check by hand for shell; save the liquor and add a spoonful to the pan for flavour.
- Hot cream, not boiledCream that has been boiled hard is more liable to separate when it meets the salty oyster liquor. Warm the pint of cream to just steaming and hold it off the heat; it finishes in the residual warmth of the pan.
- The flourA dust of flour over hot buttered oysters is the barest thickening, meant only to keep the cream from thinning to a puddle on the toast. A scant teaspoon per quart is enough; let it cook a few seconds before the cream goes in.
- YieldA quart of oysters with a pint of cream serves four to six over toast as a supper dish, or eight as a first course. Toast the bread while the oysters cook, and serve the second they are combined.
- SourcingUse oysters from a reputable fishmonger, kept cold, and cook them the day you buy them.
Oysters were the cheap protein of nineteenth-century American cities, dredged from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound in enormous quantity and shipped inland in kegs and cans once the railways reached the beds, which is why a household book of this period can call for a quart of them without comment. Cookbooks of the era carry a dozen or more oyster preparations in a row: scalloped, fried, broiled, panned, in fritters and in soups. The name Oysters à la Crême reflects the general fashion for French-styled titles on plain English dishes in American cookbooks, a fashion often associated with the later decades of the century; the technique here is simply creamed oysters on toast, a dish that turned up on hotel breakfast and supper menus. The collapse of the great oyster beds through overfishing and pollution in the early twentieth century is the reason this quantity of oysters now reads as a luxury rather than as household economy.