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Oysters, Boiled
Wash the shells carefully; throw the oysters into a saucepan of boiling water, and let them boil quickly for three or four minutes, then take them up, and serve them in the shells, with melted butter in a tureen. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per dozen.
A bare-bones Victorian method: oysters cooked in their shells and sent to table with a sauceboat. Two things need translating — the timing and what "melted butter" meant in 1900.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn British cookery books of this period, melted butter means a white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, roughly a tablespoon of flour to two ounces of butter and half a pint of liquid, seasoned. Simply pouring warm butter into a tureen is a modern misreading, though it works perfectly well if that is what you want.
- Three or four minutes is the outside limitBecause the oysters are in the shell, the shell buffers the heat. Lift them the moment the shells gape wide; past that point the meat tightens and turns rubbery.
- Sort the oysters before they go near the potAny oyster already gaping that does not close when tapped should be discarded, and so should any that stays shut after boiling. Scrub the shells under cold running water with a stiff brush; the recipe's "wash carefully" is doing a lot of work, since whatever is on the shell ends up in the cooking water and on the table.
- Boiling versus steamingDropping shells into a full pan of water dilutes the oyster liquor that escapes as they open. An inch of water in a covered pan gives the same result in about the same time and keeps more flavour in the shell.
- ServingAllow six to nine oysters a head as a first course, a dozen as a light main. Serve them in the deeper half-shell with their liquor, on a warmed dish; brown bread and butter and lemon are the usual accompaniments.
- The price note1s. 6d. to 3s. a dozen is the retail cost at the time of writing and has no bearing on anything you will pay now.
Cassell's gives boiled oysters barely three lines. Oysters were far more commonplace in Victorian Britain than they are now: native beds in Essex, Kent and the Solent supplied London in enormous quantity, and oysters turned up in pies, sauces, stuffings for boiled fowl and as a stretcher in beefsteak puddings. The collapse came later, through overfishing, pollution and disease in the beds, which is why the same shellfish reads as extravagant today and why the book's price note now looks so strange. Cooking oysters in the shell is among the oldest treatments there is — it needs no knife, no skill at shucking, and the heat opens the shell for you.