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Oyster Fricassee
1 pint oysters Milk or cream 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley 1 egg Clean oysters, heat oyster liquor to boiling-point, and strain through double thickness of cheese-cloth; add oysters to liquor and cook until plump. Remove oysters with skimmer and add enough cream to liquor to make a cupful. Melt butter, add flour, and pour on gradually hot liquid; add salt, cayenne, parsley, oysters, and egg slightly beaten.
A simple velouté built on oyster liquor, with the oysters returned at the end and an egg for richness. Everything depends on how briefly the oysters see heat.
- Cook until plump means about a minuteOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they firm slightly, roughly 45 seconds to 2 minutes in barely simmering liquor. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery, and no amount of cream will bring them back.
- The liquor is the stockA pint of shucked oysters carries roughly half a cup of liquor, though the amount varies with how they were shucked and packed. Bringing it to a boil and straining it through doubled cheesecloth removes grit and shell fragments; skip that step and the sauce may be sandy.
- Enough cream to make a cupfulTop the strained liquor up to a total of one cup; the ingredient list allows either milk or cream. Half-and-half gives a middling result; heavy cream makes it noticeably richer than the two tablespoons of flour were sized for.
- Building the sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid is a medium white sauce. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding the hot liquid gradually, whisking, then simmer two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste.
- The egg needs temperingWhisk a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the beaten egg first, then return the mixture to the pan off direct heat. Added straight to a simmering sauce the egg will curdle into threads.
- Bring it back up gentlyAfter the egg goes in, warm the fricassee over low heat, stirring, until it thickens slightly and reaches about 160F. Do not let it boil.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of oysters in a cup of sauce will stretch to about three light servings, or four as a first course. Dishes of this kind were commonly served over buttered toast points or in patty shells.
Fricassee in nineteenth-century American cookbooks had drifted a long way from the French sense of a white braise of cut-up chicken; by 1900 it meant almost any cooked meat or shellfish finished in a pale sauce, and oysters, then cheap and shipped inland by barrel and rail, were an obvious candidate. Oyster cookery filled whole chapters of books like this one for the plain reason that Atlantic and Gulf beds were still yielding enormous volumes, and the shellfish reached ordinary kitchens by the quart. The egg beaten in at the end is an older thickening habit than the roux it joins here, and the combination of the two is characteristic of the New England cooking-school style, which liked a measured white sauce as the base of everything and then enriched it.