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Scalloped Oysters
1 pint oysters 1 cup grated bread crumbs 1/2 cup coarse cracker crumbs 1/2 cup butter 1 cup oyster liquor 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Drain and clean the oysters; rub a pudding dish thickly with cold butter, sprinkle the bottom with a layer of bread crumbs. Mix the rest of the bread and cracker crumbs and stir in the butter. Arrange the oysters and bread in alternate layers, season each with pepper and salt. Pour over the oyster liquor, bake twenty-five to thirty minutes in a quick oven.
A straightforward layered bake that depends on two things: real oyster liquor and restraint with the layers. Everything else is assembly.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400-425F. The high heat is deliberate — it sets the crumbs and heats the oysters through before they have time to shrink and toughen.
- Check at 20 minutesTwenty-five to thirty minutes is the outside range for a full dish. The oysters are done as soon as their edges ruffle and the liquor bubbles at the sides; past that they turn rubbery no matter how much butter is involved.
- Two layers, not moreThe standing rule for scalloped oysters is crumbs, oysters, crumbs, oysters, crumbs. Three or more oyster layers leaves the middle steaming in liquid while the top browns.
- Pudding dishA ceramic or glass baking dish; the recipe gives no size, but something in the region of 1 1/2 quarts suits this quantity. Surface area is what gives you browned crumbs.
- Oyster liquorA pint of shucked oysters does not reliably yield a full cup of strained liquor. Make up the difference with cream or milk rather than water, and strain whatever liquor you have through a fine sieve to catch shell grit.
- Grated bread crumbsThis means dry crumbs grated from a stale loaf, coarser and drier than commercial fine crumbs and much drier than fresh. Panko is closer in behavior than packaged breadcrumbs.
- ButterMelt it before stirring it into the crumbs so they are evenly coated — half a cup is a lot of fat and it should not sit in pockets.
- YieldServes four as a main course, six to eight as a side. It is best straight from the oven; reheating cooks the oysters a second time.
Scalloped oysters belong to a long American line of dishes built on cheap, abundant East Coast shellfish, and the name is often said to come from the older practice of cooking such mixtures in a scallop shell rather than from any connection to the scallop as an ingredient, though an alternative derivation from escalope or collop is also current. By the time this book appeared, oysters were still a genuinely everyday food, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans. The dish became fixed in the American holiday repertoire istmas tables in particular dash and survives there largely unchanged, though the oysters are now the expensive part of a recipe that was originally thrift cookery, a way of stretching shellfish with stale bread and crackers.