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Oysters, Baked
Mix three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs with half a salt-spoonful of salt, a salt-spoonful of white pepper, and a quarter of a nutmeg, grated. Beard a dozen oysters, dip them in beaten egg, roll them in the seasoned crumbs, put each one in its lower shell, and lay a small piece of butter upon it. Place the oysters in the oven, or before the fire for a few minutes, until they are quite hot. Before serving, squeeze a little lemon-juice upon them. Probable cost of oysters, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per dozen. Sufficient for one or two persons.
A simple Victorian oyster dish that lives or dies on timing: the oysters are in the oven only long enough to set the crumb and heat them through.
- Don't overcook"A few minutes, until they are quite hot" is the whole instruction and it is the right one. Five to seven minutes in a hot oven is enough; once the oysters shrink and firm up they turn rubbery and no amount of lemon juice will rescue them.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature because it assumes a range or an open fire. Use 425-450F, high enough to colour the crumbs before the oyster overcooks. The alternative given, "before the fire", is a broiler at close range.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon was the small spoon in the salt cellar, roughly a quarter teaspoon. So: about 1/8 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon white pepper for a dozen oysters.
- A quarter of a nutmegGrated, that comes to something in the region of half a teaspoon or a little more, which is assertive against a dozen oysters. Modern palates will want less; start with a pinch and taste the crumb mixture before you coat anything.
- BeardingTo beard an oyster is to trim off the dark tough frill of gill tissue around the edge of the body. With today's cultivated oysters this is often barely necessary, but any stringy or gritty margin should come away.
- The lower shellThe deep cupped half. Save it when you shuck, rinse it, and steady the filled shells on a bed of rock salt in a sheet pan so they do not tip and lose their butter. Small ramekins work if the shells are broken.
- Crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dried bread grated on a fine grater, closer to modern fine dry crumbs than to fresh soft crumbs. Panko is too coarse and shaggy for this coating.
- YieldA dozen oysters serves one as a light supper or two as a first course, as stated. Scale the crumb mixture rather than the seasoning at a strict multiple; the nutmeg in particular does not need doubling.
Cassell's compiled this in the decades when oysters were still a familiar London food, sold from street stalls and shellfish bars as well as fishmongers, and the recipe's frank quotation of a price per dozen was normal in a book aimed at households budgeting to the shilling. The instruction to serve each oyster in its own lower shell reflects a period fondness for dishes returned to their natural vessel, the same impulse behind scallops served in the shell and eggs baked in ramekins. Baked and "scalloped" oysters in seasoned crumbs appear across English and American cookbooks of the era in near-identical form; the grated nutmeg is the older element, a survival of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century habit of spicing fish and shellfish that had largely faded from savoury cooking by the twentieth century. The Thames and Essex beds were in time badly depleted by overfishing and disease, and the abundant oyster of Cassell's world was gone.