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Curried Oysters
Put the liquor drained from a quart of oysters into a sauce-pan, add a half-cup of butter, two table-spoons flour, and one of curry powder, well mixed; let boil, add oysters, and a little salt; boil up once and serve.
A short sauce built on oyster liquor, with curry powder standing in for most of the seasoning. The whole dish takes about ten minutes, and the only real risk is overcooking.
- The hinge: "boil up once"The oysters go in at the very end and need only the moment it takes for their edges to ruffle, roughly one to two minutes. Anything longer and they shrink and turn rubbery, and they will keep cooking in the hot sauce on the way to the table.
- A quart of oystersThat is a quart of shucked oysters in their liquor, roughly 25 to 35 depending on size. Buying them by the pint or quart in liquid is still how shucked oysters are sold at a good fish counter.
- How much liquor you will actually getA quart container yields perhaps 1 to 1.5 cups of liquor once drained, which is thin for a sauce. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth to catch shell grit, and make up any shortfall with cream or milk rather than water.
- The butter-to-flour ratioHalf a cup of butter to two tablespoons of flour is a very loose roux by modern standards, and the sauce is liable to separate into an oily layer. Increasing the flour towards an equal measure with the butter, or cutting the butter back to a quarter cup, will give something that holds together more reliably.
- Curry powderReady-mixed British-style blends were on sale in this period, though some cooks mixed their own; a mild commercial curry powder is the nearest modern equivalent. Cook it in the butter with the flour for a minute before the liquor goes in, or the raw spice tastes dusty and chalky.
- SaltOyster liquor is already saline. Taste the finished sauce before adding any, and season after the oysters have released their own liquid.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as a first course, two or three as a supper dish. The period expectation would be toast points or plain boiled rice underneath to catch the sauce.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by Methodist housewives, gives oysters an entire section despite being written hundreds of miles from salt water. That is a fact about railroads: by the 1870s barrels of shucked oysters packed in ice moved inland from Baltimore and the Chesapeake fast enough that oysters were a staple of Midwestern winter entertaining, cheap enough to be everyday and formal enough to open a dinner. The curry powder is the other half of the period's signature. Ready-mixed "curry powder," a British colonial invention rather than an Indian one, was sold by American grocers through the nineteenth century and appears constantly in books of this era applied to whatever protein was to hand, oysters, chicken, veal or leftover mutton, usually in exactly this form: a butter-and-flour sauce with a spoonful of the blend stirred through it.