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Oysters, Sauce of, White
Open a dozen oysters. Do this very carefully, so as to preserve every drop of their liquor; beard and halve or quarter them. Mix an ounce of butter and an ounce of flour smoothly together in a stewpan. Add the oyster liquor, a pinch of cayenne, the eighth of a small nutmeg, grated, and as much milk as will make the quantity up to three-quarters of a pint. Stir the whole gently over the fire until the sauce is smooth and thick. Put the oysters into a heated metal strainer, and while in this hold them in boiling water for two or three seconds; put them in a tureen, pour the sauce over them, add a tea-spoonful of anchovy, and serve. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian oyster sauce for boiled fish or poultry, built on a plain white roux enriched with the oysters' own liquor. Everything depends on keeping the oysters out of the heat.
- The hinge: the oysters barely cookTwo or three seconds in boiling water sets the outside and nothing more; the hot sauce finishes them in the tureen. Any real simmering and they shrink and turn to rubber, which is exactly what the metal strainer is designed to prevent.
- Raw and near-raw shellfishOysters treated this way are effectively raw. Buy from a supplier you trust, keep them cold and use them the day you open them. Anyone pregnant, elderly, immunocompromised or with liver disease should not eat them at this degree of doneness.
- Quantities in the rouxAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup. Three-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, or a little under 2 US cups, and that total includes whatever liquor the dozen oysters give up — a few fluid ounces, depending on their size.
- "Anchovy"Almost certainly anchovy essence, a thin bottled sauce. Anchovy paste is the nearest survivor; use about half a teaspoon of paste, slackened with a little of the hot sauce, in place of the teaspoonful specified, and taste before adding more salt.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilly gill along the edge of the oyster. It is tough and sandy rather than dangerous, and comes away with a fingernail or a small knife. The recipe halves or quarters them; with small oysters there is little to divide.
- Save every drop of liquorShuck over a bowl and strain the liquor through muslin or a fine sieve to catch shell fragments. It is the seasoning of the whole sauce, and bottled clam juice is a poor stand-in.
- Nutmeg and cayenneAn eighth of a small nutmeg is a scant quarter teaspoon of freshly grated. Both spices should register as warmth behind the shellfish, not as flavours in their own right.
- Yield and servingEnough for three or four as a sauce, not a dish. It belongs with boiled or steamed white fish, boiled fowl, or a plain steamed pudding of cod. Send it out at once; standing dulls it and firms the oysters.
Oyster sauce in the English sense has nothing to do with the fermented Cantonese bottling; it is a white sauce carrying whole oysters, and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the standard accompaniment to boiled cod, turbot and boiled fowl. The "probable cost, 2s" is the price of the finished sauce, and by the time Cassell's was written the depletion of the native beds from over-dredging, pollution and disease was already well advanced \\ a process under way by the 1860s and 1870s — the process that in time turned the oyster into an expensive thing. The anchovy essence and the whisper of cayenne and nutmeg are pure Victorian sauce-making practice: a savoury, faintly pungent background that flatters bland boiled fish.