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Oyster Patties (Pint small oysters pint sweet)
1 pint small oysters ½ pint sweet cream 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour Pepper and salt to taste Let cream just come to a boil. Mix flour in a little cold milk, and stir into the hot cream. Add salt and pepper. Let the oysters come to a boil in their own liquor, skim carefully and drain off all the liquor. Add the oysters to the cream and boil up at once. Fill patties.
A simple oyster cream to spoon into baked pastry shells. The whole thing hinges on not overcooking the oysters.
- The oysters"Let the oysters come to a boil in their own liquor" means bring them just to the point where the edges curl, which takes about a minute or two over medium heat. Held at a boil they tighten into rubber, so pull them the moment they plump and the liquor clouds.
- QuantitiesA pint of shucked small oysters is a good many; counts vary too much to pin down. Five Roses is a Canadian book, so its pint is probably the imperial pint (about 570 ml) and the half pint of cream about 10 fluid ounces rather than a US cup. "Sweet cream" simply means fresh rather than soured; a rich cream suits the dish.
- The thickeningOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of cream gives a loose sauce, deliberately so. Slake it in two tablespoons of cold milk until smooth before it goes into the hot cream, or it will lump.
- Don't discard the liquorThe recipe drains it away, which throws out a good deal of the oyster flavour. Straining it, reducing it by half and adding a spoonful or two to the cream is one way to keep it.
- "Fill patties"Patties here are pre-baked shells of puff pastry, not a mixture pressed into cakes. Frozen puff pastry vol-au-vent shells work; bake them according to their directions until dry through, then fill just before serving so they do not go soft.
- YieldEnough for about 8 to 10 small pastry shells, or 4 servings as a first course.
- SeasoningSalt cautiously at the end. Oyster liquor is already saline. The recipe says only "pepper"; white pepper will keep the sauce pale if that matters to you.
Oyster patties were a fixture of North American entertaining from the mid-nineteenth century through the First World War, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel in enormous quantities. They belonged to the buffet and the church supper as much as the dinner table, since a creamed filling could be made ahead and the shells baked in the morning. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, collected such recipes from Canadian housewives; the branded tablespoon of flour in the ingredient list follows from the book being an advertisement for the flour itself. The brevity is typical: the book spends its words on the filling and leaves "fill patties" to stand on its own.