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Oysters, Patties of, with Mushrooms
Prepare and bake the patties as in the last recipe. Trim, wash, drain, and dry five or six button mushrooms. Cut them into small pieces, and fry them in half an ounce of fresh butter for four or five minutes. Beard a dozen oysters, thicken the liquor with a tea-spoonful of flour, and pour it over the mushrooms, with a table-spoonful of veal gravy and a table-spoonful of thick cream. Season with a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, a pinch of cayenne, and the eighth of a small nutmeg, grated. Stir in the oysters, simmer all gently for about half a minute, fill up the patties, and serve. Time, twenty minutes to bake the patties. Probable cost, 6d. each. Sufficient for a dozen patties.
A Victorian savoury filling for pastry cases, built on the oysters' own liquor. Everything here is quick except the pastry, and the one thing that will spoil it is overcooking the oysters.
- The half-minute is not a misprintOysters shed water and turn to rubber within a minute or two of real heat. Have the sauce hot and the cases warm, stir the oysters in, count to thirty, and fill. If the sauce is thin, thicken it before the oysters go in, never after.
- Patties means pastry casesThe "last recipe" is puff-paste patty cases b>bouchées or small vol-au-vents. Bought all-butter puff pastry cut into rounds of about 2½ inches, a smaller round scored into the top of each, gives much the same thing; the scored lid lifts out to leave a cavity. The original gives a baking time of twenty minutes but no oven temperature — a hot oven of around 425F suits bought puff pastry at that size.
- BeardingTo beard an oyster is to trim off the dark frilly gill and the tough muscle attachment, leaving the plump body. Do it over a bowl and strain the liquor through muslin — grit is the usual reason a dish like this fails.
- Oyster liquorA dozen oysters yield only a few tablespoons of liquor, which is all the recipe asks it to do, alongside a spoonful each of gravy and cream. Do not top it up with water; if you are short, use a little more cream. Shucked oysters sold in tubs come with their liquor and work perfectly well.
- Veal gravyA spoonful of reduced veal stock or gravy of the kind a well-run Victorian kitchen would have had to hand. Any light, well-reduced chicken or veal stock does the job; the point is body and savour.
- NutmegAn eighth of a small nutmeg is roughly a quarter teaspoon freshly grated across a dozen patties — assertive by modern habit but characteristic of English oyster cookery of the period. Grate it fresh; pre-ground has none of the effect intended.
- Buying the oystersUse oysters from a reputable supplier, keep them cold, and use them the day you buy them. Very brief cooking of this kind does not make questionable shellfish safe.
- YieldTwelve small patties — two or three each as a first course, or a canapé for six to eight. The filling does not hold; assemble at the last moment or the pastry softens.
Oyster patties were a fixture of the English supper table and the ball buffet through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap enough to be everyday food in Britain and the native beds of Essex and Kent supplied London by the cartload. Cassell's prices these at sixpence each, which places them as a modest party dish rather than a luxury — the expense is in the puff paste and the cream as much as the shellfish. The combination of oyster, mushroom, nutmeg and cayenne in a small pastry case owes much to French bouchées technique, which entered English cookery books at some point in the earlier nineteenth century and never quite left. By the end of the century over-fishing and pollution had begun to push native oyster prices up, and dishes like this one drifted from the supper table towards the special occasion.