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Oysters, Stewed, Economical
Open a dozen oysters, and carefully preserve the liquor. Put a piece of butter the size of a small egg into an enamelled saucepan, pour the oysters and their liquor into this, and dredge a little flour over them. Season with a pinch of salt and cayenne, and a little grated nutmeg, and add three table-spoonfuls of cold water. Shake the saucepan over a gentle fire until the sauce is smooth and thick, but the oysters must not be allowed to boil. Serve on toast, and pour out the gravy very carefully, so as to leave undisturbed any grit or sediment that may have settled to the bottom. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for one or two persons.
A single-pan oyster stew that lives or dies on heat control: the oysters go in raw and come out barely set, thickened only by the flour dredge and their own liquor.
- The hinge: never boilOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they plump, roughly one to two minutes in liquid held just below a simmer. Boiling shrinks the muscle and turns them to rubber, which is why the original insists on a gentle fire and constant shaking.
- "Time, a quarter of an hour"This probably covers opening the oysters and bringing the pan slowly up to heat rather than fifteen minutes of cooking. If you prefer, warm the butter, liquor and water first and add the oysters at the end; the original puts them in at the start.
- Butter the size of a small eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian recipes commonly gave fat by egg and walnut; a walnut is variously reckoned at about 1 to 2 tablespoons.
- Enamelled saucepanEnamel is non-reactive, and bare iron or unlined copper can discolour a pale oyster sauce and lend it a metallic edge, which is very likely why it is specified. Any modern non-reactive pan does the job: stainless, enamelled cast iron, or a lined copper.
- Handling the liquorRather than decanting carefully off the sediment at the end, strain the raw liquor through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before it goes in the pan. Oyster liquor almost always carries shell grit and a little sand.
- If you are not shuckingA dozen shucked oysters with their liquor from a fishmonger works identically; look for about 1/2 cup of liquor. Jarred oysters are packed in more liquid than the recipe expects, so reduce or omit the three tablespoons of water.
- The flour dredgeA dredge means a light dusting, no more than a teaspoon or two. Shake it in off the heat and stir it through the melted butter before the liquid goes in, or it will set into lumps in a pan you cannot stir vigorously.
- Yield and servingOne generous portion or two small ones, on hot buttered toast. Season at the end: oyster liquor is already salty and varies a great deal by oyster.
- "Probable cost, 2s."Two shillings, in a book where oysters were still cheap enough to be called economical. The price is only useful now as a reminder of how the oyster's status has inverted.
Cassell's calls this stew "economical" without irony: for much of the nineteenth century, though less so by the date of this book, oysters were often among the cheaper animal foods in Britain, dredged in vast quantities from the Thames estuary, Essex and the Firth of Forth, and sold from street barrows to people who could not afford meat. The recipe is presumably economical within that world because it uses a dozen oysters rather than the two or three dozen a fuller stew would demand, and stretches them with butter, flour, water and toast — though that is a guess. Overfishing, pollution and disease in the beds during the later Victorian decades pushed prices up sharply, so that by the twentieth century the oyster had become a luxury and dishes like this one read quite differently. The seasoning of cayenne and nutmeg is entirely of its period; grated nutmeg went into savoury sauces and stews as routinely as pepper.