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Oysters, Scalloped, with Mushrooms
Take one dozen oysters, wash them in their own liquor, put them in a lined saucepan, strain the liquor over them, and heat slowly to boiling point, but do not let them boil. Take them out and remove their beards. Mince two ounces of mushrooms, melt one ounce of butter in a small saucepan, and stir the mushrooms in this over a gentle fire for ten minutes. Add the oysters and their liquor, and mix well. Butter some scallop shells, fill them with the mixture of oysters and mushrooms, cover with bread-crumbs, sprinkle a little pepper and salt over, dot some little pieces of butter on top, and bake for fifteen minutes in a gentle oven. Sufficient for six scallop shells. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A small, straightforward dish whose success hinges entirely on restraint with the heat. The oysters are effectively cooked twice, so anything more than the gentlest handling will turn them to rubber.
- The hinge: never let the oysters boilBringing them slowly to the point of boiling in their own liquor is enough to firm them; a true boil, even briefly, makes them tough and shrunken. Pull them the moment the liquor trembles at the edges.
- "Lined saucepan"Victorian kitchens used tin-lined copper, and the instruction is really a warning against bare copper or iron reacting with the salty liquor. Any stainless, enamelled or nonstick pan does the job.
- "A gentle oven"The original gives no temperature; a gentle or slow oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 300-325F. The filling is already cooked, so the fifteen minutes is only to heat through and colour the crumbs; if they are not browning, finish under the grill for a minute rather than extending the bake.
- BeardsThe dark frill of gill tissue around the oyster. Shucked oysters may or may not still carry it, so check rather than assume there is anything to remove.
- Oyster sizeA dozen Victorian natives were considerably smaller than a dozen Pacific oysters today. Judge by volume: you want roughly enough to half-fill six small shells, so six or eight large modern oysters may be plenty.
- MushroomsTwo ounces is about 55 g, a small handful of button or field mushrooms, minced fine. Ten minutes in butter over a low flame drives off their water and concentrates them; do not rush it or the filling will be watery.
- Scallop shellsDeep scallop shells were a standard piece of kitchen equipment. Small ramekins, ovenproof individual gratin dishes or shell-shaped ceramic dishes of about 3-4 fl oz all work. Butter them well.
- YieldThe recipe says only "sufficient for six scallop shells"; six shells would serve six as a first course or savoury, not as a main. "Probable cost, 1s. 6d." is eighteen pence for the whole dish.
Scalloped oysters, meaning oysters baked in shells or shell-shaped dishes under a crumb topping, run through nineteenth-century British and American cookery in dozens of small variations. The name is generally traced to the vessel rather than the mollusc: the ridged scallop shell is said to have been the standard container for any small baked mixture, and "to scallop" came to mean cooking anything that way. The recipe is priced at eighteen pence. The addition of mushrooms and butter is the sort of small enrichment that distinguishes the many near-identical scallop recipes crowding Victorian dictionaries of cookery from one another.