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Oyster Shortcake
2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3/4 cupful milk 1 quart oysters 1/2 cupful Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls cornstarch 1/4 cupful cream Salt and pepper to taste Mix flour, baking powder and 1/2 teaspoonful salt, then sift twice, work in Crisco with tips of fingers, add milk gradually. The dough should be just soft enough to handle. Toss on floured baking board, divide into two parts, pat lightly and roll out. Place in two shallow Criscoed cake tins and bake in quick oven fifteen minutes. Spread them with butter. Moisten cornstarch with cream, put into pan with oysters and seasonings and make very hot. Allow to cook a few minutes then pour half over one crust, place other crust on top and pour over rest of oysters. Serve at once.
Sufficient for one large shortcake.
A savory biscuit shortcake, built like the strawberry version but filled with creamed oysters. The whole dish turns on not overcooking the filling.
- The hinge: two minutes, not more"Allow to cook a few minutes" is too long by modern standards. Heat the oysters in their own liquor with the cream and cornstarch only until the edges ruffle and the sauce thickens, about two minutes; past that they tighten into rubber.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for a thin biscuit layer in a shallow tin; the recipe gives no thickness.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, and it is still on shelves. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter or lard gives better flavor in the crust. Grease the tins with whatever you use.
- A quart of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, i.e. two pints; depending on grade that could be anywhere from about 25 to 75 oysters. Drain them and reserve the liquor; it thins the sauce if the cream alone is too thick.
- Cornstarch and creamA quarter cup of cream will not slake two tablespoons of cornstarch smoothly on its own. Whisk them cold into a loose slurry, add some reserved oyster liquor, then bring the sauce up before the oysters go in.
- TinsTwo 8- or 9-inch round cake pans. "Shallow" matters, the layers should be thin enough to split the filling between them without collapsing.
- Handling the doughWork the fat in until it is the size of peas and stop, and pat rather than knead. The recipe says to add the milk gradually, which is the safer route to "just soft enough to handle". Overworked biscuit dough goes tough in the oven.
- YieldOne large shortcake serves four as a main course, six as a first course. It must go to the table immediately or the bottom crust turns to paste.
Savory shortcakes were a familiar part of American cookery alongside sweet ones, and creamed oysters over a split biscuit was one common way of stretching a cheap, plentiful shellfish into a dinner course. Oysters were still an everyday food in 1900s America rather than a luxury, sold shucked by the quart and eaten in enormous quantity along the Atlantic seaboard and inland by rail. The Crisco in the crust places the book after the shortening's introduction in 1911: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, who also produced The Story of Crisco, and both were published under the sponsorship of Procter & Gamble to persuade cooks that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in everything from pastry to frying. The recipes are genuine, but the ingredient list is an advertisement.