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OYSTERS, SAUCE OF, BROWN (another way)
Fry a table-spoonful of flour and a finely-minced shallot in two ounces of fresh butter until they are brightly browned, add a quarter of a pint of good brown stock, a pinch of cayenne, and stir the sauce until it is smooth and thick. Let it boil, then draw the pan to the side, and add a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, a table-spoonful of claret, and a dozen oysters, which have been bearded and cut into quarters. When these are warmed through, the sauce is ready for serving. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A small brown sauce built on a browned roux, finished with oysters that are barely warmed. It is a garnish sauce for boiled fish, poached cod or steak, not a stew.
- The hinge: the oysters barely cookThey go in after the pan is drawn to the side of the stove, off the direct heat though not necessarily off it entirely, and they are done as soon as they are hot through. Held over heat they shrink, weep liquor into the sauce and toughen.
- Quarter of a pint of stockAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup or 150 ml. That is a small quantity of sauce by design; it should coat, not pool.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons; a tablespoonful here is close to the modern one. The tablespoon of flour to two ounces (55 g) of butter gives a loose, glossy roux rather than a stiff one.
- "Brightly browned"Cook the flour, butter and shallot until the mixture is the colour of a hazelnut shell and smells biscuity, five to seven minutes over moderate heat. Stop short of dark brown — a scorched roux loses thickening power and turns the sauce bitter.
- Good brown stockReal veal or beef stock, unsalted and reduced. A commercial cube will make this sauce salty once the oyster liquor is added; use a low-sodium stock or a homemade one and season at the end.
- BeardingThe beard is the frilled dark gill fringe around the oyster. Trim it off with scissors; any liquor from the shells can be strained into the sauce, as it carries much of the flavour, though the recipe does not call for it.
- ClaretNineteenth-century shorthand for red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red does the job; a tablespoon is there for depth and colour, not for wine flavour.
- Yield and costEnough for three or four as a sauce; the finished quantity is small, a quarter-pint of stock plus a dozen quartered oysters. The 2s. is the book's own probable costing, and it is not a trifling sum for a sauce.
- A note on the oysters themselvesBecause they are only warmed, this is effectively an almost-raw shellfish dish. Buy from a reputable supplier and skip it for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable to Vibrio.
Oyster sauce in the English sense — chopped oysters suspended in a butter or stock base — was standard table equipment through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, served with boiled cod, turbot, fowl and, in the brown version, with steaks and made dishes. It has nothing to do with the Cantonese condiment of the same name. The brown variant, as here, replaces the usual milk or white sauce with a browned roux and meat stock, sharpened with lemon and a spoonful of claret, which suited it to red meat. Cassell's gives several versions in succession, a habit of the big Victorian dictionaries of cookery, which aimed to catalogue every accepted treatment rather than pick one. That oysters could be called for by the dozen in a sauce for three people says a good deal about their price before the beds of the Thames estuary and the Channel coast were fished out, a decline generally traced to overfishing and, later, to a series of contamination scares around the turn of the century.