Home › Shell Fish › Spindled Oysters
Spindled Oysters
2 doz. large oysters 2 ounces bacon 6 slices of thin toast 6 steel skewers Drain, clean and dry on a soft towel the oysters; cut the bacon in very thin slices. Fill the skewers with bacon and oysters alternately, running the skewer cross grain through the muscle of the oyster and stringing bits of bacon by one corner so that each slice may overlay an oyster. Do not crowd. Place the skewers across the baking pan and cook over gas or in a quick oven for five minutes. Do not take the oysters from the spindle but lay each one on a slice of toast, pouring over them the drip from the pan Roasted Oysters on Toast 18 large oysters 1 teaspoon Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup cream 1/2 cup oyster liquor 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 slices of toast Drain and clean the oysters. Scald and strain the oyster liquor. Scald the oysters in the liquor. For the sauce, melt the butter, add the flour and seasonings mixed, stir until smooth, add the oyster liquor slowly and cook until smooth, then add the cream and lastly the oysters. Pour over the toast and garnish with slices of lemon.
Two oyster dishes share the page: skewered oysters with bacon, and a creamed version on toast. Both hinge on the same point, which is that oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F in modern terms. The five minutes given is plausible at that heat, but check at three: the oysters are done when the frills curl and the bacon has just tightened.
- "Cook over gas"The alternative to the oven is presumably direct flame, which in a modern kitchen most nearly means the broiler, with the skewers laid across a shallow pan so the drippings collect. Steel skewers are specified in the ingredient list; wooden ones will scorch and cannot be laid across a hot pan.
- Bacon thinnessTwo ounces stretched over two dozen oysters means slices shaved thin enough to be nearly translucent, hung by one corner so they drape rather than wrap. Standard supermarket bacon is too thick to render in five minutes; ask for it sliced thin, or use pancetta shaved at the deli counter.
- Oyster liquorIn the second recipe this is the liquid drained from the shucked oysters. Scalding and straining it is not fussiness - it removes shell grit and bits of grit that would otherwise end up in the sauce.
- Scalding the oystersBring the strained liquor to just below a simmer and drop the oysters in for a minute or two, until they plump and the edges curl. Held longer they turn rubbery and shed water into the sauce.
- The sauceOne teaspoon of flour to a tablespoon of butter is a very loose roux, which is intentional: this is a thin pouring sauce for toast, not a chowder. It should coat a spoon and no more.
- YieldThe spindled oysters serve six, one skewer and one slice of toast each; the creamed oysters serve three. Both are portioned as a savoury course rather than a main.
- Buying oysters"Large" here means shucked oysters of a size that will stay on a skewer. Buy them shucked in their liquor from a fish counter, keep them cold, and use them the day you buy them.
The Gold Medal cook book was published by the Washburn-Crosby Company, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, and like many flour-company books of the period it seems to exist largely to put the brand name inside a recipe - hence the single teaspoon of Gold Medal flour thickening the sauce in the second dish. The skewered version belongs to a broad family of bacon-and-oyster savouries that includes the British angels on horseback, generally traced to the Victorian dinner table, where a small hot savoury closed the meal. That American cooks were spending two dozen oysters on a course for six says a good deal about the period: East Coast and Gulf oysters were still cheap enough to be an everyday food rather than a luxury, and shucked oysters in liquor were shipped inland by rail in quantity, which is how they turn up so casually in a Minnesota flour pamphlet.