Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oysters, Poulets And
Oysters, Poulets And
Roast a couple of chickens in the usual way. Open two dozen oysters, and scald them in their own liquid for two minutes. Beard them, and put them aside to cool. Dissolve two ounces of fresh butter in a stewpan, and mix an ounce of flour smoothly with it. Add the oyster liquor, three table-spoonfuls of cream or milk, a pinch of cayenne, a pinch of salt, and a pinch of white pepper. Stir the sauce gently over the fire until it boils, take it off the fire, add six drops of lemon-juice and the oysters, and either pour the sauce over the fowls, or serve it separately in a tureen. Time, twenty minutes to prepare the sauce. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons. OYSTERS, POWDER OF (for flavouring Sauces, etc., when Oysters are not in season).
Open a dozen fresh oysters, and pound them thoroughly in a mortar with half a tea-spoonful of salt, then press them through a hair sieve. Mix with them as much dried flour as will make them into a smooth paste; this will be a little more than two ounces. Roll the mixture out three or four times, and the last time leave it one eighth of an inch thick. Stamp it into small cakes, dredge these with flour, dry them gradually in a cool oven, and be very careful that they do not burn. To prevent this they should be turned every twenty minutes. When the cakes are quite dry, crush them to powder, and put this into small bottles, cork and seal them securely, and store in a dry place. When sauce is wanted mix a tea-spoonful of the powder smoothly with an ounce of butter and six table-spoonfuls of milk. Stir the sauce over a gentle fire until it boils, season it with a pinch of cayenne, add a squeeze of lemon-juice, and serve. Time, four or five hours to dry the cakes. Probable cost of oysters, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per dozen. Allow a tea-spoonful of powder for half a pint of sauce.
Two recipes share this page: a roast chicken with oyster sauce, and a shelf-stable oyster powder. The first is straightforward; the second should not be attempted, for reasons set out below.
- Why the oyster powder failsRaw pounded oysters bound with flour and dried for four or five hours in a cool oven are never brought to a temperature that reliably kills pathogens, and neither the oven's heat nor the final dryness is measured or verified. If the cakes are not dried right through before being corked, sealed and stored, they can support bacterial growth, including staphylococcal toxin, which survives later cooking. Buy bottled oyster sauce or dried oyster powder from a commercial producer instead.
- "Roast in the usual way"Cassell's assumed the reader knew, and gives no weight, time or oven heat. By modern practice a chicken is roasted at around 375-400F and taken to an internal temperature of 165F at the thigh joint.
- Scald, do not simmerTwo minutes in their own liquor is brief by design. Oysters held longer contract and turn rubbery; here they are added only after the pan has left the fire, so they get no more than the residual heat of the sauce.
- BeardingBearding means pulling away the dark frilled gill mantle from the edge of the oyster. It is stringy rather than harmful, and with small modern shucked oysters many cooks skip it.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor almost always carries shell grit. Pour it through muslin or a fine sieve before it goes into the roux, or the sauce will be sandy.
- The sauce ratioTwo ounces butter to one ounce flour is about 4 tablespoons butter to a scant 1/4 cup, a slightly rich roux. Two dozen oysters yield roughly half a pint of liquor; with the three tablespoons of cream this gives a sauce of coating consistency for eight.
- Lemon last, off the heatThe recipe gives no reason, but acid stirred into a hot milk-and-oyster-liquor sauce can encourage it to separate, and in any case the lemon goes in after the pan leaves the fire, along with the oysters.
- Yield and costSufficient for six or eight, as given. The 3s. 6d. is late-Victorian household costing and is of historical interest only.
Oysters were cheap protein in nineteenth-century Britain, dredged in enormous quantities from the Thames estuary, Whitstable and the Essex flats, and they turn up in Victorian cookery as a stretcher and a seasoning as well as a luxury — cheap barrelled oysters and expensive natives coexisted throughout the period \— appearing in steak pies, in stuffings, in ketchup, and in sauces poured over roast fowl and boiled cod. The pairing of poultry with an oyster sauce was standard enough that Cassell's could file it as a matter of routine. The companion recipe for oyster powder belongs to a whole genre of Victorian preserving intended to carry a flavour through the closed season, the old rule being to eat oysters only in months with an R in them, which in practice meant avoiding the spawning summer. That trade collapsed within a generation or two: overfishing, pollution and the typhoid scares damaged the native beds in the early twentieth century, and oysters went from a working-class staple to the expensive item they are now.