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Oysters, Croquettes Of
Take a dozen plump juicy oysters, put them in a saucepan over a gentle fire for a minute or two to harden them, then beard them, and cut each one into six or eight pieces. Mix an ounce of butter smoothly in a stewpan with half an ounce of flour, add the juice of the oysters, a pinch of cayenne, a tea-spoonful of anchovy sauce, a grate or two of nutmeg, and a quarter of a pint of milk. Stir these ingredients over the fire until the sauce is smooth and thick, then lift the pan off the fire for a minute, add a tea-spoonful of good beef or veal gravy, the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice. Stir the sauce again over the fire until the eggs are set, then add the oysters, let them get quite hot (if this point is not attended to the croquettes will not be good), spread the mixture out upon a plate, in a layer about an inch and a half thick, and put it aside until quite cold. Strew some finely-grated bread-crumbs on a board. Divide the oyster mixture into equal-sized parts, and roll these to the shape of corks or balls; dip them in the yolk of an egg beaten up with a tea-spoonful of oil and a little salt and pepper; roll them in the bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot fat until they are crisp, and lightly browned all over. Dry them well before the fire on a cloth placed upon an inverted sieve, and serve them piled on a napkin, and garnished with fried parsley. Time to fry the croquettes, five to seven minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A classic croquette built on a thick egg-enriched béchamel — the technique is sound, but two details in the original need translating and one timing needs cutting.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe mixture must be genuinely cold and firm before shaping, or the croquettes will burst in the fat. Spread it in the inch-and-a-half layer as directed and give it at least three hours in the refrigerator; overnight is better than the "put it aside" of a cool Victorian larder.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint in this book is an imperial quarter-pint, 5 fl oz, so a scant 2/3 cup of milk. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons and half an ounce of flour is about 2 tablespoons by volume.
- Don't overcook the oystersThe initial minute or two in the pan is only to firm them enough to cut cleanly. The later instruction to "let them get quite hot" means hot through, not simmered — a full boil at that stage shrinks them to erasers and thins the sauce with released liquor.
- BeardingTo beard an oyster is to trim off the dark frilly gill and the tough muscle where it attached to the shell. With shucked oysters from a tub this takes seconds with kitchen scissors.
- Anchovy sauceBottled anchovy sauce of the Victorian type is harder to find now, though anchovy essence is still made. A scant half-teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a mashed oil-packed fillet, gives the same salty background; season only at the end, since both it and the oyster liquor bring salt.
- Beef or veal gravyThe teaspoon quantity suggests something concentrated rather than thin pan juices. A little reduced beef stock or a scrape of demi-glace does the job; the quantity is small enough to omit without harm.
- Setting the yolksOff the heat when the yolks go in, then back over the lowest heat and stir constantly. The mixture should thicken to the point where a spoon drawn through it leaves a clear track, and must not simmer or it will curdle.
- FryingThe book says only "hot fat"; around 350-375°F suits these. Cork-sized croquettes from a cold, cooked mixture may colour in 2 to 3 minutes, so judge by colour rather than relying on the stated five to seven, which likely assumes a cooler fat. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- YieldA dozen oysters and this quantity of sauce should give roughly ten to twelve small croquettes, which reads more like a first course than a main dish, though that is close to the original's five or six persons.
Croquettes belong to the French repertoire that dominated ambitious English cookery in the second half of the nineteenth century: a stiff, cooled sauce bound with egg yolk, cut or rolled, crumbed and fried, the same method used for chicken, sweetbreads, rice and lobster elsewhere in Cassell's. Oysters were a common filling, though two shillings for five or six people was not a trifling sum; British beds had supplied cheap oysters to the chophouse earlier in the century, and overfishing, disease and pollution in the later Victorian decades pushed prices up further. The insistence on anchovy sauce, cayenne and nutmeg is very much of its moment: bottled fish sauces were a standard seasoning in English kitchens, and the combination of a French binding sauce with an emphatically English condiment is characteristic of how this book reconciled the two traditions.