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Scalloped Oysters Supreme
Drain one quart of oysters; make a white sauce using five even tablespoons of flour, four even tablespoons of butter, two cups of milk, one teaspoon of salt, and a little pepper. Sprinkle a threepint baking dish with bread crumbs, put in a layer of oysters, cover with white sauce, sprinkle with bread crumbs; repeat this, making three layers of oysters. Use one cup of dried bread crumbs in all. Bake in a slow oven about forty minutes.
— Mrs. Stanley Vincent
A community-cookbook casserole that depends on one thing: a sauce stiff enough to absorb the liquor the oysters throw off in the oven. Most of the adjustments below are about heat and time.
- Slow ovenAround 300-325F is the usual modern reading of "slow" in a book of this vintage; the recipe itself gives no temperature. The gentle heat suits oysters, which toughen when cooked hard.
- Forty minutes is longAt 300F in three buried layers the oysters are insulated by sauce and crumbs, which is the only reason this works. Start checking at 30 minutes; the dish is done when it bubbles at the edges and the oyster edges have just curled. Oysters cooked past that point turn firm and rubbery, and no amount of sauce hides it.
- A quart of oystersShucked oysters sold by volume: one quart is roughly 1½ to 2 lb of meats, or about two dozen medium to four dozen small. Two 16 oz tubs of shucked oysters will do it.
- Save the liquorThe recipe says drain but not discard. The drained liquor is the best seasoning in the dish — reduce it briefly and whisk a few tablespoons into the finished sauce, then taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, since oyster liquor is already saline.
- The sauce is meant to be thickFive tablespoons of flour to two cups of milk is thicker than a pouring sauce, and more flour than butter means the roux will look dry. That is correct. The oysters release a good deal of water in the oven and the sauce loosens as it bakes.
- A three-pint dishThree pints is 1.5 quarts: a deep 9-inch pie plate is about right (an 8-inch square pan runs nearer 2 quarts). A wider dish spreads the layers too thin.
- Dried crumbs, not freshDried bread crumbs are specified because they soak up liquid without going to mush. Commercial fine crumbs work; panko stays too crisp and coarse for the interior layers, though it is fine on top.
- YieldSix servings as a main course with a green vegetable, eight to ten as a side at a holiday table.
Scalloped or "escalloped" oysters were common American holiday fare from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and their reach inland is a story about transport: barrels of shucked oysters packed in ice traveled by riverboat and then by rail far from the coast, so that inland households could put oysters on the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas without living near the water. The dish itself is the plainest possible use of them - layered with crumbs and a binder, baked, and served from the dish it was cooked in. Earlier versions often used only butter, cream and crumbs; a flour-thickened white sauce like this one is typical of the period after cooking-school instruction had spread, in a compiled collection where each contribution carries the name of the woman who submitted it.