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White Fricassee of Oysters
1 pint oysters 1/2 cup oyster liquor 1/2 cup cream 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper Drain, clean and dry the oysters. Put 1 tablespoon of butter into a frying pan and when hot add the oysters, cook until plump and drain again. Scald and skim the oyster liquor. Melt the butter, add flour and seasonings. Cook together. Add oyster liquor and cream slowly, cook until smooth. Beat 1 egg very light and pour the oyster sauce upon it, add oysters and return to the fire to be well heated, but it must not boil. Serve in crust or patty shells if for lunch or dinner; for breakfast or tea, serve on toast.
A creamed oyster in an egg-thickened velouté, from the era when "fricassee" still meant anything cooked in a white sauce rather than a braised chicken. The whole dish takes about ten minutes, and nearly all the risk is in the last thirty seconds.
- Never let it boilThe finished sauce is bound with a whole raw egg and will curdle into scrambled threads if it simmers. The recipe has you pour the hot oyster sauce onto the beaten egg, then return it to the fire only long enough to be "well heated" -- a bare steam, no more. The book gives no temperature.
- Divide the butterThe ingredient list gives 2 tablespoons total: 1 goes into the frying pan for the oysters, the other into the roux. The line "melt the butter" refers to the second tablespoon, in a clean pan.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper — a light hand, which suits oysters.
- Cook the oysters barely at all"Until plump" means one to two minutes, until the edges just ruffle. Oysters held longer tighten into rubber, and they get a second heating in the sauce at the end.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid in the container of shucked oysters, or what runs out when you shuck them yourself. Scalding and skimming removes the grey scum and any bits of shell; strain it through a fine sieve or cheesecloth as well.
- A pint of oystersStandard shucked measure; depending on size, somewhere in the region of a dozen to two dozen medium oysters, weighing roughly a pound with their liquor. If your container comes with less than half a cup of liquor, make up the difference with cream or a little fish stock rather than water.
- The flour brandGold Medal is the publisher's own product; any all-purpose flour behaves identically in a one-tablespoon roux. That single tablespoon plus the egg gives a sauce that naps a spoon, not a thick gravy.
- Patty shellsPuff-paste cases; the modern equivalent is sold frozen as vol-au-vent shells. What the book means by "crust" it does not say. Toast is what the book suggests for the lighter meals.
- YieldThe book gives no yield; a pint of oysters in this quantity of sauce would stretch to three or four servings depending on what it is served on.
White fricassees were once a broad category: a fricassee was any meat cut small and cooked in sauce, and cooks distinguished "brown" ones, browned first in fat, from "white" ones finished with cream and an egg liaison. Applying the term to oysters made perfect sense to a 1900s American cook, for whom oysters were cheap, abundant and, by many accounts, eaten at any meal of the day — which is why the recipe ends by telling you what to serve it on at breakfast and tea as well as at dinner. The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book belongs to the great wave of milling-company promotional cookbooks, distributed to sell flour, and the recipes are conventional turn-of-the-century American cookery with the brand name dropped into the ingredient lists.