Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oysters, Stewed
Oysters, Stewed
Beard two dozen freshly-opened oysters, put them into a basin, and squeeze over them the juice of half a lemon. Put the beards and the oyster liquor into a saucepan with half a blade of mace, half a dozen bruised peppercorns, half an inch of lemon-rind, a pinch of cayenne, and a little grated nutmeg. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, then strain the liquid, thicken it with an ounce and a half of butter smoothly mixed with a large tea-spoonful of flour, add a quarter of a pint of cream, and stir the sauce over a gentle fire until it is smooth and thick. Put in the oysters, and let them warm through (they must not boil, or they will be hard and shrunken). Place a slice of toasted bread on a hot dish, pour the oysters and the gravy upon this, and serve. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian oyster stew built on a strained, spiced oyster liquor rather than milk. Most of the work is in the sauce; the oysters themselves are barely cooked.
- The hinge: never let the oysters boilThe recipe is right, and it is the whole point. Oysters dropped into a finished sauce need one to two minutes off a gentle heat to firm slightly and heat through. Boiling squeezes the water out of them and leaves them tough and shrunken.
- BeardsThe frill of dark gill tissue around the oyster. Pinching it off is optional for eating but the recipe wants it for the stock, where it gives body and a deeper marine flavour. If your oysters are shucked and sold in tubs, use the liquor alone and simmer it for five minutes rather than fifteen.
- Quarter of an hour on the liquorThat timing applies to the beards-and-spice infusion, not the oysters. Fifteen minutes is fine for extracting mace and peppercorn.
- MeasuresA quarter of a pint of cream is an imperial gill, 5 fl oz or about two-thirds of a US cup. An ounce and a half of butter is 3 tablespoons; with a rounded teaspoon of flour this is a very butter-heavy liaison, closer to a monté au beurre than a roux.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as flat "blades" or ground. Half a blade is somewhere between an eighth and a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, added to the infusion and strained out with everything else.
- Strain properlyOyster liquor carries grit and shell fragments. Pass it through a fine sieve lined with muslin or a coffee filter, not just a colander, or the sauce will be sandy.
- SourcingBuy oysters live and closed, or freshly shucked from a fishmonger, and keep them cold until the moment they go in. Because they are only warmed through, this dish depends entirely on the quality of the shellfish; anyone avoiding lightly cooked oysters should not eat it.
- Yield and servingTwenty-four oysters serves three or four as a light supper, as stated. The toast should be dry and firm-crumbed so it holds under the sauce; cut it to fit the dish rather than laying a slice per person.
- CostFour shillings was a real sum in the 1870s.
Cassell's belongs to the period when oysters were still widely eaten in Britain, though prices were already rising. The Thames estuary, Whitstable, Colchester and the Solent supplied them in quantity, and stewed oysters on toast was a common supper dish. Over-dredging, disease and pollution reduced the native beds through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the 1920s the same dish read as extravagance. The seasoning here — mace, cayenne, lemon peel, nutmeg — is the standard English fish-sauce vocabulary of the period, inherited from eighteenth-century cookery and applied to oysters, lobster and turbot alike. The instruction not to boil is the one piece of technique the book insists on, and it is the same instruction good oyster cooks give today.