Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rolls, Oyster
Rolls, Oyster
Take two or three square French rolls, cut a slice off the top, and scoop out the greater part of the crumb. Half fill the hollows with finely-minced oysters seasoned with cayenne, and fill to the top with rich white sauce. Lay on the cover, tie it on with twine, and put the rolls in a Dutch oven before a clear fire until they are brown and quite hot. If liked, the oysters can be stewed before being put into the rolls.
A Victorian savoury built in a hollowed bread roll, meant to come out crisp outside and molten inside. Two details decide the result: the sauce must be thick enough not to soak the crust, and the oysters want only brief heat.
- Dutch ovenHere this means a reflector oven — an open-fronted metal box set facing the fire, not the heavy lidded pot. A hot oven, around 400F, on a rack in the upper third is the nearest modern substitute, taking roughly 10-12 minutes.
- French rollsSmall, firm-crusted white rolls with a close crumb, roughly the size of a modern dinner roll or petit pain. A soft supermarket roll will collapse; choose something with structure, and cut the lid straight so it sits back flush.
- Take the oysters gentlyMinced oysters need only to heat through — a couple of minutes at most. If you take the optional step of stewing them first, pull them off the heat as soon as the edges ruffle, or they turn rubbery in the second heating.
- Rich white sauceA thick bechamel, on the order of 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to half a pint of milk, enriched with cream or an egg yolk off the heat. Reserve the oyster liquor and use it in place of some of the milk. Too thin a sauce and the roll goes to pulp.
- SeasoningCayenne is the only seasoning named, in the usual Victorian savoury manner — a scant pinch. Salt lightly, since oyster liquor is already saline, and a scrape of nutmeg or a few drops of lemon is in period.
- Tying the lidKitchen twine round the roll, tied like a parcel, keeps the cap on. Brush the outside with melted butter before it goes in or the crumb dries rather than browns; remove the twine before serving.
- Yield and serviceTwo or three rolls serve two or three people as a first course or savoury, one roll each, with nothing more than a sprig of watercress. Serve immediately — they soften within minutes of leaving the heat.
Oyster rolls belong to the British savoury course, the small hot salty dish served after the sweet at a late-Victorian dinner, and they depend on a period when oysters were still cheap enough to mince. Oysters were then sold cheaply by the barrel or the score from street sellers and fishmongers; the collapse of the native English beds later in the century, from overfishing, pollution, hard winters and the typhoid scares, is what turned dishes like this from everyday cookery into luxuries. The hollowed roll is a household economy standing in for a pastry case, the same idea as a vol-au-vent or a croustade but requiring no pastry work. The direction to brown the rolls in a Dutch oven before a clear fire suggests a kitchen in which the open range, rather than the closed oven, was still used for finishing a dish, though the two coexisted for decades.