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SAUCE (Pint oysters cup milk)
1 pint oysters 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Few grains mace Drain the liquor from the oysters into a bowl, wash and pick over the oysters, strain the liquor and cook oysters until the gills begin to curl, remove the oysters. Melt the butter, add flour and seasonings, cook together, then add slowly 1 cup of the oyster liquor and milk, cook together, add the oysters and serve in a sauce boat.
A white sauce built on oyster liquor rather than all milk, meant to be poured over boiled or baked fish. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the oysters are shucked.
- Cook the oysters barely at allPoach them in their own strained liquor only until the frilled edge (the "gills") ruffles — roughly one to two minutes at a bare simmer. Lift them out immediately; any longer and they tighten into rubber, and they get a second warming when they go back into the sauce.
- A pint of oystersThat is a liquid pint of shucked oysters with their liquor, about 16 fl oz — depending on size, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen oysters. Shucked oysters sold in jars work perfectly well here and come with the liquor you need.
- If the liquor falls shortThe recipe says to add 'slowly 1 cup of the oyster liquor and milk', which most likely means 1 cup of strained liquor plus the ½ cup milk, though it can also be read as a cup of the two combined. Oysters vary; if you have less liquor, make up the difference with milk or a little fish stock rather than water, which thins the flavour.
- Strain it twiceShell grit is the usual fault in an oyster sauce. Pour the liquor through a fine sieve lined with a damp cloth or coffee filter, and rinse the oysters themselves before poaching.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than nutmeg itself. Ground mace is still sold; a very small pinch of freshly grated nutmeg is the nearest substitute, but use less than you think.
- Cook the roux, don't colour itTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1½ cups of liquid gives a fairly thin sauce — lighter than the usual medium white-sauce ratio of 2 tablespoons flour per cup. Cook the flour a minute or two to lose the raw taste, but keep it pale — a browned roux will muddy the oyster flavour and thicken less.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is already saline and varies a great deal by oyster. Add the ½ teaspoon at the end, after tasting, rather than into the roux as written.
- YieldAbout 1½ cups of sauce, enough for four servings poured over poached cod, haddock or turbot; sauces of this kind were also commonly served with boiled fowl and roast turkey.
Oyster sauce in the American and British sense meant exactly this: a butter-and-flour sauce enriched with oyster liquor and studded with the oysters themselves, served with boiled fish or poultry — nothing to do with the Cantonese condiment, made from reduced oyster extract, that later took over the name in English. It appears in a flour company's cook book because the roux is the point of the lesson: Gold Medal's promotional books, issued by the Washburn-Crosby mill of Minneapolis, worked through the standard white-sauce ratios again and again. Oysters were still cheap and widely shipped by rail in the early twentieth century, so a pint of them for a sauce was an unremarkable domestic expense rather than a luxury, and mace — the older, more genteel spice for shellfish and forcemeats — carries a distinct nineteenth-century flavour into the book.