Creamed Oysters
1 pint oysters 1/8 teaspoon celery salt 1 1/2 cups White Sauce II Clean, and cook oysters until plump and edges begin to curl; drain, and add to White Sauce seasoned with celery salt. Serve on toast, in timbale cases, patty shells, or volau-vents. One-fourth cup sliced mushrooms are often added to Creamed Oysters.
A short recipe that assumes you already own the book's sauce chapter. Two things decide whether it works: how briefly the oysters cook, and how thick you make the sauce.
- Cook the oysters barely at all"Plump and edges begin to curl" happens in roughly a minute or two over moderate heat in their own liquor. Anything past that and they tighten into rubber; pull them the moment the frills lift.
- White Sauce IIIn books of this period the numbered white sauces run from thin to thick, and a "II" is usually the medium one, on the order of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, with salt and pepper. Check the book's sauce chapter for its own proportions. If it is that medium sauce, scale to about 3 tablespoons each and 1 1/2 cups milk for the quantity called for here.
- Save the liquorDrained oyster liquor is the best seasoning in the dish. Strain it through a fine sieve to catch grit and use a few tablespoons in place of some of the milk, or reduce it and stir it in at the end.
- "Clean" means gritShucked oysters carry shell fragments. Lift them from their liquor by hand rather than tipping the container out, and run your fingers over each one.
- Celery saltAn eighth of a teaspoon is deliberate restraint. It is salt-based, so season the white sauce lightly until the celery salt and oyster liquor are both in.
- MushroomsThe optional quarter cup should be sautéed in butter and drained before it goes in; raw mushrooms will weep water and thin the sauce.
- The serving vesselsA timbale case is a small fried batter shell, a vol-au-vent a tall puff-pastry case. Frozen puff-pastry shells stand in for both, or use toast as the recipe's first suggestion.
- YieldA pint of oysters in this much sauce serves four as a first course, or two to three on toast as a light main.
Creamed oysters belong to the great American age of cheap shellfish, when oysters from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound were shipped inland by rail in barrels and sold by the quart in ordinary markets. The dish is really an exercise in the white sauce that dominated turn-of-the-century cookery school teaching: master the roux and milk sauce, then fold in whatever the season offered. The list of vessels at the end, toast to timbale case to vol-au-vent, is the period's way of showing how one preparation could be dressed up or down, the same creamed oysters serving as a family supper or as an entrée course at a formal dinner. Celery salt was a fashionable seasoning of the era, made from ground celery seed, and turns up constantly alongside oysters in books of this generation.