Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oysters, Sauce of, Brown
Oysters, Sauce of, Brown
In making this sauce, allow at least three oysters for each person. Open the fish very carefully, to preserve every drop of their liquor, then beard them, and if the oysters are large, halve, or even quarter them. Mix two ounces of butter very smoothly with an ounce of flour, add the strained oyster liquor, half a pint of brown gravy, a pinch of cayenne, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice. Keep stirring one way until the sauce is quite smooth; let it boil, then put in the oysters, and let them remain in the hot sauce for two or three seconds only; they must not be allowed to boil, or they will shrink and turn leathery. Serve the sauce very hot. A tea-spoonful of anchovy will bring out the flavour. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian brown oyster sauce, meant for boiled or roast meats and fish rather than eaten alone. The recipe's own warning about the oysters is the whole point of it.
- The hinge: oysters go in off the heatThe hinge: the oysters go in last -- The sauce is finished and boiling before the oysters arrive, and the text allows them only two or three seconds in it. Boiled oysters shrink, weep and turn rubbery, and the recipe is emphatic that they must not be allowed to boil.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British imperial measure, about 1¼ US cups. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant ¼ cup. That is a heavy roux for the liquid, so expect a coating sauce rather than a pouring one — loosen with more gravy if you want it thinner.
- "Beard them"The beard is the frilly dark gill fringe around the oyster's edge. Victorian cooks trimmed it off as tough; it is edible, and shucked oysters sold today usually arrive without much of it. Save every drop of liquor when you shuck, and strain it through muslin to catch shell grit.
- Brown gravyNot bottled gravy but the meat gravy or brown stock of the period — beef or veal stock browned with vegetables and reduced. A good reduced beef stock is the nearest modern equivalent; a stock cube will read as salt against the oyster liquor.
- "A tea-spoonful of anchovy"Anchovy essence or sauce, a standard Victorian store cupboard bottle. A teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or half a mashed salted anchovy fillet does the same job, which is to push the savoury base under the oysters without tasting of fish.
- Stirring one wayA common instruction of the era with no chemical basis; the sauce will not split if you stir it back and forth. What matters is adding the liquor and gravy to the roux gradually and off the boil, then cooking the flour out for a few minutes before the oysters go anywhere near it.
- Oysters and sourcingThree oysters a head for six means eighteen — a modest sauce quantity. Buy them live in the shell and shuck to order if you can, since the liquor is a working ingredient here and pre-shucked tubs are usually short of it.
- Cost3s means three shillings. Oysters were still cheap enough in the period for a sauce to be built around them; the same dish today is a considerably grander proposition.
Oysters ran through nineteenth-century British cooking as a flavouring rather than a luxury — in beefsteak pies, in stuffings, and above all in sauces served with boiled fish, roast mutton and boiled fowl. Cassell's gives both a white oyster sauce, bound with milk or cream, and this brown version built on meat gravy, which suited it to red meat and to darker fish. The pairing of oyster liquor with anchovy essence and cayenne is characteristic of the period's savoury sauces, where a bottled fish essence stood in for the depth a long-reduced stock might otherwise supply. The abundance is real: London's oyster beds and the Kent and Essex fisheries supplied the city in enormous volume through the century, and it was overfishing and disease in the beds, generally traced to the decades around 1900, rather than any change in taste, that turned a cheap sauce ingredient into an expensive one.