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Oyster Sauce
Make a rich cream or white sauce with the strained and skimmed oyster liquor and half a cup of milk or cream.
Simmer the oysters in just water enough to cover until they curl, but do not allow them to toughen. Chop or cut them fine and add to the sauce with a dash of white pepper or paprika, and a little lemon juice. Let all get very hot and serve at once with roast turkey or fish.
A white sauce built on oyster liquor rather than plain milk, written for cooks who already knew the proportions of a bechamel. The one thing to get right is the oysters: they need barely a minute in the poaching water, and no boiling once they are back in the sauce.
- Quantities to work fromThe original gives none. A pint of shucked oysters with their liquor, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and the half cup of milk or cream makes roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce, enough for a turkey serving eight or four to six fish portions.
- Strain the liquor properly"Strained and skimmed" is doing real work here. Oyster liquor carries shell grit and sand; pour it through a coffee filter or several layers of damp cheesecloth, and let it settle first if the oysters were freshly shucked.
- "Until they curl" is the timerThat is 45 seconds to 2 minutes in barely simmering water, depending on size. The edges ruffle and the flesh turns opaque. Past that they contract and go rubbery, which is exactly the toughening the recipe warns against.
- Use the poaching waterThe oysters give up flavour to the cooking liquid. Reduce that water by half and add it to the sauce along with the liquor rather than pouring it away, or poach the oysters directly in the strained liquor and use it all.
- A rich cream or white sauceMelt the butter, cook the flour in it a minute or two without letting it colour, then whisk in the warm liquor and milk gradually. Simmer a few minutes to lose the raw-flour taste before the oysters go anywhere near it.
- Lemon juice last, off high heatAcid added to a hot milk-based sauce over direct heat can curdle it. Stir the lemon in at the end with the pan pulled aside, and taste before adding more; oyster liquor is already salty, so season at the very end.
- Do not let it boil again"Let all get very hot" means hot enough to serve, not simmering. Once the chopped oysters are in, hold the sauce below a simmer and send it out promptly.
- ServingTraditional with roast turkey and with poached or baked white fish. It also suits boiled fowl, and it thickens as it stands, so keep a little extra warm milk to loosen it.
Oyster sauce in this sense has nothing to do with the Cantonese bottled condiment; it appears in nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks alongside bread sauce and celery sauce as one of the accompaniments to a large bird, and also with fish. Oysters were cheap and abundant along the Atlantic seaboard through the 1800s, sold by the barrel and shipped inland once the railroads reached far enough, which is why household compilations of this era treat them as an everyday ingredient rather than a luxury. The book's instruction to chop the oysters fine points to a serving style now largely gone: the sauce was meant to pour smoothly from a boat over carved meat, not to present whole oysters. The great American oyster beds were already in decline from overharvesting and pollution by the early twentieth century, and recipes like this one belong to the last stretch of the period when oyster sauce was ordinary holiday cooking.