Home › Oysters and Shellfish › Creamed Oysters
Creamed Oysters
Drain the liquor thoroughly from a quart of fine oysters. Strain and heat the liquor in a saucepan, skimming off all the scum that rises as it comes to a boil. Put the oysters in the liquor with a piece of butter the size of a walnut, and when thoroughly hot, add a pint of rich, hot cream. Cook until the oysters curl; add salt and pepper, and serve at once. A dessertspoonful of flour, worked smooth in a little of the cold cream, may be added to the cream while it is heating in a double boiler. Serve with squares of hot buttered toast, or serve poured over slices of buttered toast.
A straightforward oyster stew that lives or dies on timing. Everything else here is a matter of translating old measures.
- Watch the curl, not the clockOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, which takes roughly two to three minutes in hot liquid. Past that they tighten into rubber and shed water into the cream. Pull the pan off the heat while they still look barely set.
- A quart of oystersThat means a quart of shucked oysters in their liquor, roughly 2 lb as sold and something like three to four dozen mediums, depending on size. Supermarket tubs are usually sold in pints, so buy two.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Old books used this as shorthand for a generous knob; precision was not the point.
- A dessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, midway between the old teaspoon and tablespoon. Worked into cold cream first, it thickens the pint just enough to coat, not to make a sauce.
- Keep the cream below a boilSalt and a hard boil are both hard on rich cream, so heat the cream until steaming and combine off a fierce flame. The recipe itself has the cream added hot, and mentions a double boiler for the flour-thickened version.
- Skim the liquorThe scum that rises as it heats is mostly coagulated protein. The recipe already calls for straining first, and a fine sieve or damp cloth does most of the work of catching shell fragments and grit, giving a cleaner broth.
- Salt lastOyster liquor varies enormously in salinity depending on where the oysters were harvested. Taste after the cream goes in, not before.
- YieldServes four generously as a supper dish, six as a first course. The toast should be cut and buttered before the oysters go in the pan, since the dish will not wait.
Creamed oysters and oyster stew were everyday food in nineteenth-century America, not luxury, and cookbooks of the period commonly print several variations. Oysters were dredged in enormous quantity from Chesapeake Bay and the waters off New York and Boston, shipped inland by rail packed in ice, and sold cheaply enough that oyster saloons and cellars operated in towns well inland. The compiled household manuals of the era, of which this book is one, reflect that abundance: a long oysters-and-shellfish chapter would have seemed unremarkable to a reader of the period. The stock later collapsed through overfishing and pollution, which is why a dish once treated as plain family fare now reads as an extravagance.