Oyster Pie
Make rich pastry and line a dish, (a deep pie plate is the best), put in a layer of oysters over the bottom, with some pieces of butter on top; rub some bread crumbs fine and season with a little salt and pepper; cover the oysters well with these, put in alternately a layer of oysters, with butter and bread crumbs, until the dish is filled; the last layer should be crumbs; pour in the liquor from the oysters, cover the top with pastry, cut a hole in the centre and bake half an hour.
A late-nineteenth-century supper pie that gives no quantities and no oven temperature. Both are recoverable from the method, and the crumb layers are doing more work than they appear to.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch deep pie plate, figure a quart of shucked oysters (about 50 small or 30 large), 3-4 tablespoons butter, and roughly a cup of fine dry crumbs across the layers. The original gives no quantities at all; shucked oysters were commonly sold by the quart in this period.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe names no oven at all. A hot oven, around 425F, suits this kind of pie: the pastry should set and colour within the half hour specified, and a slower oven risks a pale, sodden bottom crust.
- The crumbs are the hingeOysters release a great deal of water as they heat. The bread crumbs between the layers exist to absorb that liquor and thicken it; skimp on them and you get a pie of pastry floating on brine. Use dry crumbs, not fresh soft ones.
- The oyster liquorAdd it sparingly, or not at all if the oysters are very plump and wet. Strain it through a fine sieve first for grit. A quart of oysters can carry a cup of liquor, and the crumbs cannot absorb all of it.
- Bottom crustBlind-baking the lined dish for 10-12 minutes at 425F before filling is a sensible modern precaution. The recipe specifies only "rich pastry" and gives no oven heat; a modern all-butter crust under a wet filling benefits from the head start.
- Timing and the oystersThirty minutes is set by the pastry, not the shellfish. Oysters cook in two or three minutes and will firm up over a half hour in the oven; there is no way to have both a browned double crust and barely-set oysters. Large oysters stand up to it better.
- The hole in the centreNot decorative. Steam from the oysters will lift or split the top crust without it. Cut it wide, half an inch or more.
- SeasoningSalt lightly. Oysters and their liquor are already saline, and the crumbs concentrate that as they absorb. Pepper generously; a blade of mace or a grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate and welcome.
- YieldServes six as a supper dish, four as a main course. Let it stand ten minutes before cutting so the crumb-thickened liquor settles.
Oyster pie belongs to the stretch of American cookery, roughly the 1840s through the 1890s, when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury. Beds in the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay were dredged hard, and rail and ice carried barrels of shucked oysters far inland, so that oyster stews, scallops, fritters and pies turn up in household books written for towns hundreds of miles from salt water. It suited supper, the light evening meal in households that took dinner in the middle of the day: a pie of this kind, assembled from a quart of oysters, yesterday's bread and a round of pastry, was the sort of thing that could be put together late and carried whole to the table. The layered crumb-and-butter construction is older than the book, being essentially the English scalloped oyster given a crust; the same method appears under both names in cookbooks of the period.