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Scalloped Oysters
Butter your dish, put in a layer of oysters, then bread crumbs and small pieces of butter and pepper on each layer; repeat until your dish is full with alternate layers of oysters and bread crumbs; put butter on top and pour the oyster liquor over the whole. Have the crumbs a little brown on top. It should be rather dry when done.
A late-Victorian supper standard with no oven temperature, no timing and no quantities. The proportions are forgiving; the cooking is not.
- Quantities to work fromA quart of shucked oysters with their liquor, about 2 cups of crumbs and 4-6 tablespoons of butter fills a 9-inch dish and serves four to six. Buy oysters in their own liquid, not packed in water.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat. A hot oven, around 425F, suits it: a slow oven leaves the oysters to poach in their liquor and weep, which is the wet result the last line warns against.
- Keep it to two layersLayers -- The recipe says to repeat until the dish is full, but two layers of oysters works better in a modern oven: oysters buried three or four deep steam rather than bake, and the middle overcooks before the top browns. Crumbs, oysters, crumbs, oysters, crumbs on top.
- TimingTwenty to twenty-five minutes, until the top is brown and the edges bubble. The oysters are done when their edges just curl; past that they tighten into rubber.
- CrumbsCoarse dry bread crumbs, or the cracker crumbs that appear in many American printed versions of this dish, both work. Fine soft crumbs from fresh bread absorb the liquor and turn to paste.
- The liquorStrain it for grit before pouring. Use half to three-quarters of a cup at most; if your oysters came in a lot of liquid, hold some back. "Rather dry when done" is the standard being set.
- SeasoningOnly pepper is mentioned because the oysters and their liquor carry salt. Taste the liquor before adding any.
Scalloped oysters belong to the long American century when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury — the beds of the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound and New England supplied barrels of them to inland towns by rail, and household cookbooks of the 1870s to 1900s commonly carry a version of this dish. The name is usually traced to the shell: to "scallop" is said to have meant cooking and serving something in a scallop shell, with the sense drifting to mean any dish of layered ingredients baked with crumbs and butter. It is the kind of dish that could be assembled in minutes from a jar of shucked oysters, yesterday's bread and the butter crock, then put in the oven while the table was laid.