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Oysters, Patties Of
Oyster patties may be served either hot or cold, and should be sent to table piled high on a napkin. They may be either baked in patty-pan or made like small vol-au-vents. When patty-pans are used, line the pans with good puff-paste, rolled out thin, put a crust of bread in each, lay on the cover, brush the top with beaten egg, and bake in a quick oven. When the pastry is sufficiently baked remove the covers, take out the bread, fill the patties with the oyster mixture, lay the covers on again, and serve. If made like small vol-au-vents, roll out some light puff pastry, half an inch thick Stamp it in rounds with a pastry-cutter, two inches and a half in diameter, press a small cutter an inch and a half in diameter on the middle of each round, to the depth of a quarter of an inch. This is intended for the lid of the vol-au-vent. Place the rounds on a buttered tin, and bake them in a quick oven until they are risen and lightly browned; then take them out, remove the smaller centre piece, scoop out a little of the inside, and fill the empty space with the prepared oysters. Put on the lid and serve. The oysters are prepared as follows. Beard a dozen oysters, and cut them into small pieces. Put the liquor from the oysters, and the beards into a saucepan, with an inch of lemon-rind, a quarter of an inch of mace, a quarter of a salt-spoonful of grated nutmeg, a small pinch of cayenne, and a pinch of pepper, and boil for seven or eight minutes. Strain the liquid, and thicken it with a dessert-spoonful of flour and half an ounce of butter; mix with it two table-spoonfuls of thick cream and a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, then add the oysters, simmer all gently together for half a minute, fill the patties, and serve. The ragout should be smooth, thick, and delicately flavoured, and should never be put into the patties until they are baked. Time, about twenty minutes to bake the patties. Probable cost, 6d. each. Sufficient for a dozen patties.
A Victorian savoury patty, built in two parts: hollow puff-pastry cases baked empty, and a small oyster ragout made at the last minute. The instruction that governs the whole thing is the last one — the filling goes in only after the pastry is baked, and the oysters themselves are barely cooked.
- Half a minute means half a minuteThe oysters are added to the finished sauce and simmered for thirty seconds, no more. The flavour base comes from boiling the beards and liquor separately; the oysters themselves only need to firm slightly, or they turn rubbery and weep liquid into the sauce.
- A quick ovenConventionally read as roughly 425-450F, though Victorian oven terms were impressionistic and unstandardised. Puff pastry needs high heat to lift; in too cool an oven the butter melts out before the layers set and the cases stay flat and greasy.
- BeardingThe beard is the frilly dark gill fringe around the oyster. Trim it off with scissors and keep it — here it goes into the pan with the liquor as the flavouring, then is strained out. Shucked oysters sold in tubs are usually already bearded, in which case use the packing liquor alone and expect a milder sauce.
- The crust of breadThis is blind baking before ceramic beans were common. A cube of stale bread holds the case open and absorbs steam; foil and pie weights do the same job. Either way the case must be emptied and refilled hot.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons; a salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, so the nutmeg here is a scant pinch. Half an ounce of butter is a generous tablespoon, and with 2 teaspoons of flour it makes a very small roux for a very small quantity of sauce.
- MaceA quarter-inch of mace means a fragment of blade mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, which is strained out with the beards. Ground mace works but cannot be removed, so use a scant pinch.
- Yield is optimisticA dozen oysters and two tablespoons of cream will not generously fill twelve two-and-a-half-inch cases. Reckon on doubling the filling for a dozen patties, or make six.
- Cutter sizes2½ inches is about 6.5 cm, the inner lid cutter 1½ inches about 4 cm, pressed a quarter-inch down only — it must not cut through. Half-inch pastry is roughly 12 mm, thicker than most modern pastry rounds and necessary for the lift.
- ServingPiled on a folded napkin on a platter, which absorbs steam and keeps the bases from going soft. The recipe allows them hot or cold, but hot they are best served within minutes of filling.
Oyster patties belong to the long stretch of British cookery when oysters were cheap, plentiful and treated as a flavouring rather than a luxury -- barrelled natives moved inland by rail through the middle of the nineteenth century and appeared in pies, sauces, stuffings and steak puddings as readily as in the shell. The vol-au-vent form is French, the name meaning roughly "flight in the wind" for the lightness of the risen case, and it is generally traced to the early nineteenth-century Parisian pâtissiers; Antonin Carême is the figure usually credited, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The note of "probable cost, 6d. each" is characteristic of the book, which was written for households counting the shilling as closely as they counted the courses.