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Oysters and Eggs
Put half a pound of fresh butter into a stewpan with a little chopped parsley and one or two mushrooms shredded small. Season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg. When the butter is melted put in about four dozen oysters with their liquor, make them quite hot, and add to them five or six hard-boiled eggs cut in slices. Let the whole simmer for a quarter of an hour, and then put some into each oyster shell. Cover each with bread raspings, and colour in the oven or with a salamander.
A Victorian scalloped-oyster dish, generous with butter and far too generous with time on the heat. Two changes make it work: cut the simmer, and cut the butter.
- The simmer is the problemA quarter of an hour will shrink four dozen oysters into rubber. Warm them in the butter just until the edges ruffle and they plump, about one to two minutes, then fold in the eggs off the heat. The browning under the broiler finishes the cooking.
- Half a pound of butterThat is 225 g for four dozen oysters, which will flood the shells. Two to three ounces (55-85 g) is enough to carry the parsley and mushrooms; the oyster liquor supplies the rest of the moisture.
- StewpanA lidded saucepan with straight sides and a flat bottom. Any saucepan will do; a wider pan helps, so the oysters heat evenly in one layer rather than stewing in a heap.
- Bread raspingsCrusts dried hard in a cooling oven and grated to a coarse powder o dried breadcrumbs. Panko or dried fine breadcrumbs tossed with a little melted butter will brown more reliably than plain raspings.
- SalamanderA long-handled iron plate heated red and held over food to glaze the top. A broiler on high, rack near the element, does the same in two to three minutes; watch it, as raspings scorch quickly. In the oven, use 425F/220C.
- The shellsScrub and boil the shells before filling, and set them on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in a shallow tray so they sit level and do not tip their contents. Deep shells only — the flat halves hold nothing.
- Oysters and their liquorShucked oysters sold in tubs work, but drain and reserve the liquor separately so you control how wet the mixture is. If the oysters are large, halve them so they heat through in the same short time.
- YieldFour dozen oysters and five or six eggs fills roughly 24 to 30 shells, enough for eight as a substantial first course. Season lightly at the start: oyster liquor is salty and reduces as it heats.
Scalloped oysters served back in their own shells were a staple of English and American entertaining through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap enough to be counted by the dozen rather than the piece and were sold from street barrows in London and New York alike. The pairing with hard-boiled egg and buttered crumbs belongs to a wider Victorian habit of stretching shellfish into a hot savoury that could be assembled ahead and browned at the last moment; the salamander was the usual tool for glazing tops without heating a whole oven, though this recipe offers the oven as an alternative.