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Oysters on Toast
One quart oysters, one cup sweet cream, one-half cup butter, pepper and salt to taste; the oysters must be put into a hot skillet with one cup cream and one-half the butter, pepper and salt; toast as many slices of bread as you need, then take the remaining one half, add to it one cup boiling water, pour this on the toast to moisten it, then pour on the oysters and cream over it.
A supper dish of the plainest kind, and the whole thing turns on not overcooking the oysters. The original assumes you know when to stop.
- The hinge: two or three minutesShucked oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and curl, which takes about two to three minutes in simmering cream. Held longer they tighten into rubber and weep liquor into the sauce.
- A quart of oystersThat means a quart of shucked oysters in their liquor, sold today in pint and quart tubs at a fish counter. The count varies a good deal with size: somewhere upward of forty to a quart for larger oysters, more for smaller ones. Keep the liquor to loosen the sauce if it thickens.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means fresh rather than soured or cultured, not sweetened. Use heavy or whipping cream; light cream and half-and-half are more prone to breaking when they meet the salt and oyster liquor.
- A hot skillet, but not a fierce oneBring the cream and butter to a bare simmer before the oysters go in and keep it there. A hard boil will curdle the cream and toughen the shellfish at the same time.
- The second half of the butterThe remaining quarter-cup of butter is melted into a cup of boiling water and poured over the toast. It is a butter sauce for moistening the bread, not a thickener -- the toast should be damp and rich, not soaked to collapse.
- BreadUse a firm white loaf cut about half an inch thick and toasted dry and hard. Soft sandwich bread disintegrates under the butter water before the oysters arrive.
- SaltOyster liquor is already saline. Season the cream lightly at the start and correct at the end, after the oysters have released their juices.
- YieldFour generous suppers, or six lighter servings, at two slices of toast apiece.
Creamed oysters on toast belonged to the same nineteenth-century supper repertoire as oyster stew and scalloped oysters, and dishes of the kind are common in American household books of the period. Oysters were then cheap and abundant along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, shipped inland packed in ice and barrels once the railways reached far enough, so a quart of them was an unremarkable thing for a household of ordinary means to buy. Supper in American books of this period generally means the light evening meal that followed a substantial midday dinner, which fits a dish built on toast and finished in a single skillet. The butter-and-boiling-water moistening of the toast is worth noticing: it does the work that a poured-over sauce would do in a modern recipe, and keeps the cream for the oysters alone.