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Oyster Sauce
1 pint oysters 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1 cup milk or Chicken Stock Salt Pepper Oyster liquor Wash oysters, reserve liquor, heat, strain, add oysters, and cook until plump. Remove oysters, and make a sauce of butter, flour, oyster liquor, and milk. Add oysters, and season with salt and pepper.
A plain white sauce built on oyster liquor, meant to be spooned over boiled or baked fish, poached chicken, or roast turkey. The whole recipe turns on how briefly the oysters are cooked.
- The hinge: cook the oysters barely at all"Cook until plump" means one to two minutes in the barely simmering liquor, until the edges ruffle. Past that they tighten into rubber and weep liquid back into the sauce.
- Straining the liquorHeating the liquor before straining is what makes the grit and shell fragments settle and catch. Bring it just to a simmer, then pour it through a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or muslin.
- How much liquorThe recipe gives no quantity because it depends on your oysters. A pint of shucked oysters usually yields 1/2 to 3/4 cup; with the cup of milk that puts total liquid near 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups, which suits 1/4 cup each of butter and flour for a medium-bodied sauce. If your oysters are dry, make up the difference with more milk or stock.
- The roux1/4 cup butter is 4 tablespoons; 1/4 cup flour is about 1 oz. Cook them together two or three minutes without colouring, then add the warm liquor first and the milk after, whisking, so the sauce stays smooth.
- Return the oysters off the heatAdd them back at the end and let residual heat warm them through. Reheating the finished sauce hard will undo the careful first cooking.
- Chicken stock versionUsing stock instead of milk gives a lighter, more savoury sauce that suits poached fish; milk gives the pale, creamy sauce traditionally sent up with boiled fowl and turkey.
- SeasoningSalt last; oyster liquor is already saline. White pepper keeps the sauce from being speckled, and lemon juice or a grating of nutmeg appears in many nineteenth-century oyster sauces, though this recipe calls for neither.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to sauce four to six servings.
Oyster sauce in the English and American sense has nothing to do with the fermented Cantonese condiment; it is a butter-and-flour sauce enriched with oysters and their liquor, and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a standard accompaniment to boiled turkey, boiled fowl and boiled cod. Oysters were cheap and abundant on both sides of the Atlantic for much of that period, sold by the barrel and shipped inland once rail and ice made it practical, which is part of why cookery books of the era treat a pint of them as an everyday ingredient rather than a luxury. Its place among the fish and meat sauces fits the pattern of a master white sauce varied by the liquid and by the addition folded in at the end.