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Steamed Oysters
Lay some oysters in the shell in some air-tight vessel, placing the upper shell downward so the liquor will not run out when they open. Set them over a pot of boiling water (where they will get the steam), and boil hard for twenty minutes; if the oysters are open they are done; if not, steam till they do open. Serve at once and eat hot, with salt and a bit of butter. Or, wash and drain one quart select oysters, put in pan and place in steamer over boiling water, cover and steam till oysters are plump with edges ruffled; place in heated dish with butter, pepper and salt, and serve.
Two methods here: oysters steamed in the shell, and shucked oysters steamed in a pan. Both are sound, but the timing in the first is far longer than anything a modern cook would use.
- Twenty minutes is the thing to ignoreOysters in the shell open in roughly 4 to 8 minutes over hard-boiling water, depending on size. Twenty minutes of hard steam leaves them shrunken and rubbery; pull them the moment the shells gape.
- Which shell goes downThe point of "upper shell downward" is to keep the liquor from draining as the shell opens. In practice, set each oyster with the deep, cupped half down and the flat half up, which does the same job more reliably.
- "Air-tight vessel"A covered pot, a steamer basket with a tight lid, or a roasting pan sealed with foil. The seal matters only insofar as it traps steam; nothing needs to be pressure-tight.
- Shucked oysters need two minutes, not twentyThe second method is self-timing and better written: stop when the oysters plump and the edges ruffle. On a rolling steam that is about 2 to 3 minutes for select oysters.
- "Select" oystersAn American market grade for shucked oysters of medium size, roughly 25 to 35 to the pint, still used by some suppliers. Any medium shucked oyster works.
- Buy them aliveIn-shell oysters should be tightly closed, or should close when tapped, before they go near the steamer. Discard any that gape open beforehand, and discard any that fail to open during steaming rather than prying them.
- YieldA quart of shucked oysters serves four as a main course or six as a starter. Allow six to twelve oysters in the shell per person.
- ServingThe butter, salt and pepper are the whole seasoning, and the liquor caught in the shell is the sauce. Serve on heated plates; steamed oysters cool very fast.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the late 1870s, several hundred miles from salt water, and yet it carries a full section on shell-fish. That is a fair measure of what railroads and packed ice did to the American table: by the 1870s barrels of Chesapeake and Long Island oysters moved inland cheaply enough that oysters were everyday food in Midwestern towns, sold by the can and the quart as well as in the shell. The nineteenth-century "oyster craze" produced oyster saloons, oyster suppers as church fundraisers, and cookbooks that assumed a household could get a quart on short notice. The two methods here reflect that split supply — the in-shell version for oysters that arrived whole, the pan version for the shucked quart that was more common the farther one lived from the coast.