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Stewed Oysters
Put the juice into a saucepan and let it simmer, skimming it carefully; then rub the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs and one large spoonful of flour well together, and stir into the juice. Cut in small pieces quarter of a pound of butter, half a teaspoonful of whole allspice, a little salt, a little cayenne, and the juice of a fresh lemon; let all simmer ten minutes, and just before dishing add the oysters This is for two quarts of oysters.
A 19th-century oyster stew built on the oysters' own liquor rather than milk, thickened with hard-boiled egg yolk. The recipe assumes you bought oysters in the shell or in bulk liquor, so the first line has no ingredient list attached to it.
- The hinge: oysters go in lastThe sauce is finished before the oysters touch it. They need only long enough for the edges to ruffle and firm, roughly one to two minutes in liquid held just below a simmer; beyond that they tighten and squeak.
- "The juice"This means the oyster liquor drained from the shucked oysters. The recipe gives no quantity for it, and how much two quarts of oysters will yield varies. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth first.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound of butter is 4 oz (1 stick). One large spoonful of flour reads as a rounded tablespoon. Two quarts of shucked oysters is roughly 4 lb; the number of oysters that represents depends on their size and grade.
- Egg-yolk thickeningMash the three cooked yolks with the flour and a little of the warm liquor into a smooth paste before it goes in, or it will stay lumpy. The yolks give body and a slight richness that flour alone does not.
- Whole allspiceHalf a teaspoon of whole berries is meant to perfume the liquor during the ten-minute simmer, not to be eaten. Fish them out before the oysters go in, or tie them in a scrap of cloth.
- Butter and lemon togetherAdd the lemon juice off the boil if you can, though the original puts it in with the butter and simmers everything together. Ten minutes at a bare simmer, stirred, is what the recipe expects.
- Undercooked oystersBarely warmed oysters carry a real Vibrio risk, particularly in warm months. Hold them in the hot liquor until the flesh is opaque and the edges have curled rather than pulling them at the first sign of heat.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of oysters will serve eight to ten as a course, more as a spooned sauce. Period practice was to ladle it over toast, into pastry shells, or onto a hot deep dish with crackers alongside.
Stewed oysters were everyday food in 19th-century America, not a luxury: oysters were dredged in enormous quantities from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound, shipped inland by rail in barrels and kegs, and sold cheaply enough that oyster cellars and saloons were fixtures of ordinary city streets. The version here belongs to the older, richer line of the dish, thickened with pounded hard-boiled egg yolk in the way English cookery had long thickened fish and oyster sauces, before the milk-and-butter oyster stew of the American lunch counter became the default. The allspice and cayenne are also a survival of an earlier taste, when whole spice steeped in the liquor is often said to have been a common seasoning for shellfish. The casual assumption that a household would open two quarts of oysters at once already marked a world on its way out.