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Oysters, Preserved, How to Cook
Open the tin, take out the oysters carefully, and put them on a hot dish in the oven, so that they may be gradually warmed. Strain the liquor which was with them in the tin, and put it into a saucepan with the same quantity of milk and a little salt and cayenne, and let it get quite hot, then thicken it with a little flour and butter, and let it boil. Strain it over the oysters, and serve immediately. Send pepper and vinegar to table with this dish. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A stovetop cream sauce poured over tinned oysters — essentially a quick creamed-oyster dish for a household with no access to fresh shellfish. Almost everything here depends on restraint with heat.
- The hinge: the oysters are already cookedTinned oysters have been heat-processed in the can, so the only aim is to bring them up to serving temperature. The recipe asks only that they be 'gradually warmed' on a hot dish in the oven; no temperature is given, and a gentle oven is what is wanted. Overheat them and they shrink and turn to rubber.
- "Time, a quarter of an hour"That is the total time to assemble the dish, not a cooking time for the oysters. The sauce takes most of it.
- Equal quantities of liquor and milkWhatever liquor the tin yields, match it with the same volume of milk, as the recipe directs. If your tin is packed in water rather than its own liquor, the sauce will be thin in flavour.
- Thickening "with a little flour and butter"Thickening 'with a little flour and butter' -- Most likely butter and flour worked together to a paste and whisked into the hot liquid in small pieces. Keep the quantity small: this is a pouring sauce, not a thick one. It must come to a boil, as the recipe says, or it will taste of raw flour.
- Straining twiceThe tin liquor is strained going into the pan (to catch shell grit and shreds), and the finished sauce is strained again over the oysters. The second strain is what keeps the dish smooth; do not skip it if you used beurre manié.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a pinch, not a teaspoon. Salt cautiously; tinned oyster liquor is already saline. The recipe also directs that pepper and vinegar be sent to table with the dish.
- Cost and yield9d is Victorian pricing; 'sufficient for five or six persons' assumes this is one dish among several at a meal. As a modern first course it serves two to three.
Cassell's places this among its oyster entries at a moment when the English oyster was ceasing to be a cheap food. Through the first half of the nineteenth century oysters were working-class fare, sold by the barrel and the bushel; overfishing, silting and disease in the native beds are generally said to have pushed prices up, and tinned oysters filled the gap in inland British kitchens. That is why a general dictionary of cookery needed an entry on cooking a preserved oyster at all: the tin was no novelty. The treatment is conservative, a cream-and-liquor sauce, with the oysters only warmed rather than poached.