Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oysters, Curried
Oysters, Curried
Open two dozen oysters without losing any of their liquor. Put them into a saucepan over the fire for a minute to harden them, then beard them and put them aside. Dissolve two ounces of fresh butter in a stewpan, mix smoothly with it a table-spoonful of curry-powder and a tea-spoonful of dried flour; add a minced onion, and stir gently until the onion is tender, then add the oyster-liquor and a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Let the sauce boil, then put in the oysters; let them simmer for half a minute, stirring them gently all the time, and serve on a hot dish, with a border of rice boiled as for curry. Time, a few minutes. Probable cost of oysters, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per dozen. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A quick oyster curry that lives or dies on timing: the oysters are in the hot sauce for well under a minute. Everything else can be prepared in advance.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersThe recipe's brief plunge to firm them, then half a minute in the finished sauce, is exactly right and should not be extended. Oysters held in simmering liquid for more than a minute or two tighten into rubber and leak their liquor into the sauce.
- BeardingBearding means pulling off the dark frilly gill along the edge of the oyster, together with any tough scraps left after shucking. The brief heating makes this easy; on a raw oyster the beard tears.
- Buying the oystersTwo dozen shucked oysters in their liquor from a fishmonger will do, and save a good deal of work. You want roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of liquor for the sauce; if the oysters are dry, top it up with fish stock or bottled clam juice rather than water.
- "A tea-spoonful of dried flour"Plain flour, dried in a low oven or a dry pan to drive off moisture and take the edge off its raw taste. It is a light binder for the butter rather than a real thickener; the sauce is meant to be thin enough to run around the rice.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, so that is the lemon juice. Fry the curry powder in the butter for a good minute before the liquid goes in, otherwise the raw spice flavour stays on top.
- Curry powderA commercial mild-to-medium blend is the intended article; the Victorian versions leaned heavily on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek with modest chilli. Start with a level tablespoon and add more once the sauce is together, since strengths vary widely.
- "Rice boiled as for curry"Plain long-grain rice, well washed, boiled in plenty of salted water until just tender, drained and dried off briefly no butter or stock. Press it into a ring or spoon it in a border around the edge of a warmed dish.
- YieldThree or four as a light course, as stated, or two as a main with the rice. The prices given, 1s. 6d. to 3s. a dozen, are the book's own costing.
Curried oysters belong to a large family of British curries of the nineteenth century in which commercial curry powder was used less as an Indian cooking method than as a strong savoury seasoning for whatever was cheap and to hand -- veal, rabbit, cold mutton, lobster, eggs. Oysters had long been plentiful and cheap, dredged in quantity from beds in Essex, Kent and the Solent, and sold as street food and pie-filling for working households; from the 1860s and 1870s overfishing and polluted, disease-hit beds sent prices climbing towards the figures quoted here. The instruction to serve with "a border of rice boiled as for curry" follows a common Anglo-Indian presentation of the period, in which rice framed the dish on the platter rather than being heaped beneath it.