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Fricasseed Oysters
Take a slice of raw ham (corned and not smoked), soak in boiling water for half an hour, cut in very small slices and put in a sauce-pan with two-thirds pint of veal or chicken broth well strained, the liquor from one quart oysters, one small onion minced very fine, a little chopped parsley, sweet marjoram and pepper. Let these simmer twenty minutes, boiling rapidly for two or three minutes. Then skim well and add one scant table-spoon of corn starch mixed smoothly in one-third cup of milk, stir constantly, and when it boils add the oysters and one ounce of butter; just let it come to a boil, remove oysters to a deeper dish, then beat one egg and add to it gradually some of the hot broth, and when cooked stir it into the pan; season with salt and pour all over the oysters. When placed upon the table some squeeze the juice of a lemon over it.
A stewed oyster dish thickened twice, first with cornstarch and then with egg. The whole method hinges on keeping the oysters and the egg away from a hard boil.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersThe oysters go in only long enough for the sauce to return to a boil, then come straight out. Even a minute or two past that point and they shrink and turn rubbery; err on the side of pulling them the moment their edges ruffle.
- The egg liaison will curdle if boiledTempering the beaten egg with hot broth before returning it to the pan is the whole safeguard. Once the egg is in, hold the pan below a simmer, around 170-180F, and stir until it thickens. "When cooked" in the original means thickened, not boiled.
- Corned hamThis means salt-cured but unsmoked ham, which is hard to find now. A thick slice of unsmoked gammon or fresh pork shoulder brined a day is the closest match; plain smoked ham will dominate the oysters. The half hour in boiling water is to draw out excess salt, which is why the salt is not added until the very end.
- Two-thirds pintAbout 1 1/3 cups of broth, plus the liquor from a quart of shucked oysters, which typically runs another cup or so. Strain the oyster liquor through a fine sieve or cloth first to catch shell grit.
- A quart of oystersShucked oysters were sold by volume; a quart is roughly 2 lb of meats, which depending on size may be anywhere from three to six dozen. Buy them shucked in their liquor rather than shucking your own, since the liquor is a working ingredient here.
- Simmer twenty minutes, then boilThe long simmer is to draw flavour from the ham and onion and reduce slightly; the brief hard boil helps the scum rise so it can be skimmed. Both happen before any oyster or egg is near the pan.
- CornstarchA scant tablespoon slaked in a third of a cup of milk. Add it in a thin stream while stirring, and let it boil once to lose the raw starch taste before the oysters go in.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course with toast or crackers, more as a first course. The lemon at table is worth doing; it lifts an otherwise rich, pale sauce.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the mid-1870s, several hundred miles from salt water, and its fish and oyster recipes are a small monument to the railway. Barrelled and canned oysters travelled inland from Baltimore and the Chesapeake in enormous quantity through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1870s oysters were cheap enough to be everyday food in Midwestern towns that had never seen the coast. That abundance explains a recipe that spends a quart of them on a fricassee. The word fricassee, borrowed from French and long since naturalised in English cookery, meant a dish of small pieces cooked in a sauce rather than roasted, and the egg-and-broth liaison finished off the heat is the classic French thickening. The instruction that the ham be corned and not smoked is the mark of a careful writer: smoke would flatten the oysters entirely.