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Oyster Pie
Line a deep pie-dish with puff-paste; dredge with flour, pour in one pint oysters, season well with bits of butter, salt and pepper, and sprinkle flour over; pour on some of the oyster-liquor, and cover with a crust having an opening in the center to allow the steam to escape.
Or, line the pie-dish half way up with good pie-crust, fill the dish with pieces of stale bread, place a cover of paste over this, and bake about twenty minutes in a brisk oven. Take off crust, have ready some oysters prepared as for patties, fill the pie with them, and replace the crust and serve at once; or line dish with a good puff-paste, place an extra layer around the edge, and bake in a brisk oven; fill with oysters, season with pepper, salt, and one table-spoon butter, sprinkle slightly with flour, and cover with a thin crust of paste; bake quickly; when the top crust is done, the pie will be ready to take up. Serve promptly, as the crust quickly absorbs the gravy. Some like this cold for picnics or traveling.-Mrs. Carrie Beck.
Three variations on the same dish, all of them hinging on the same problem: oysters overcook long before pastry browns. Read the second and third methods as the solutions to the first.
- The hinge: oysters versus crustOysters need about two minutes of heat and turn rubbery and shrunken beyond that. The blind-baked variants exist for exactly this reason — bake the shell empty, cook the oysters separately and briefly, then combine at the last moment.
- "Brisk oven"Brisk means hot, somewhere around 400-450F, though the book states no temperatures. Note that the twenty minutes given in the recipe applies to the bread-filled shell; the first method is given no time, only "bake quickly" in the third.
- Quantity of oystersA pint of shucked oysters is roughly a pound by weight, perhaps two dozen depending on grade. The recipe specifies neither dish size nor number of servings.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid drained from the shucked oysters. Strain it — it carries grit and shell fragments. Bought tubs of oysters come packed in it; if you shuck your own, save every drop, as it is the only liquid in the pie.
- "Prepared as for patties"A cross-reference to the book's oyster patty filling: oysters briefly heated in their own liquor with butter and seasoning rather than baked. A few minutes at most, though the details are not given on this page.
- The bread fillingStale bread in the second method is a blind-baking weight, nothing more. Pie weights or dried beans on parchment do the same job and are easier to lift out cleanly.
- Dredging with flourThe flour sprinkled over the oysters and under them is the only thickener. It needs the oyster liquor and butter to hydrate, so do not skip pouring the liquor in, or you get raw flour paste.
- ServingThe instruction to serve promptly is real — the bottom crust of a shellfish pie goes soggy within minutes. The suggestion to eat it cold for picnics reflects an era with different assumptions about how long cooked shellfish sat about; refrigerate leftovers promptly and eat within a day.
Oyster pie belongs to the long stretch of American cooking, roughly 1800 to 1900, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland in barrels and cans — which is why a landlocked Ohio community cookbook like Buckeye Cookery (generally traced to an 1876 Ohio printing, with the expanded 1877 Minneapolis edition appearing as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) can devote a whole Shell-Fish chapter to them. Chesapeake and Long Island Sound beds supported an industry large enough that oysters functioned as everyday protein rather than luxury, and railroads carried them to towns that had never seen salt water. The three methods given here, all under one contributor's name, show a cook working out the same difficulty repeatedly: the encased pie is often said to be the older English form, while blind-baking the shell and filling it at the table looks like the compromise that saved the oysters. By the early twentieth century overharvesting and pollution had thinned the beds, prices rose, and dishes like this migrated from the weeknight table to the holiday one, where oyster pie still survives in parts of the Chesapeake and the Carolinas.