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Oysters a la Astor
1 pint oysters 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon finely chopped shallot 1 tablespoon finely cut red pepper 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice 1 1/2 teaspoons vinegar 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce 1/2 teaspoon beef extract Salt and paprika Wash and pick over oysters, parboil, drain, and to liquor add enough water to make one cup liquid; then strain through cheese-cloth. Cook butter, shallot, and pepper three minutes, add flour, and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, oyster liquor. Add seasonings and oysters. Remove oysters to small pieces of bread sauted in butter on one side. Pour sauce over oysters and garnish with thin slices of cucumber pickles.
A chafing-dish oyster dish of the sort served at hotel suppers around 1900, built on a small brown-tinted sauce made from the oysters' own liquor. It comes together in about fifteen minutes once the oysters are shucked.
- Do not overcook the oysters"Parboil" here means only until the edges ruffle, roughly a minute in their own liquor. They are returned to the hot sauce at the end, which finishes them; longer cooking at either stage makes them tough and shrunken.
- A pint of oystersThat is a shucked pint, liquor included, about 16 to 24 medium oysters and enough for four small servings. Buy shucked oysters in liquid rather than draining a jar, since the liquor is the whole base of the sauce.
- Beef extractBovril or a concentrated beef base. Half a teaspoon of a modern paste is plenty; if using a bouillon cube, use a quarter of one and cut the added salt, as these are far saltier than the original extract.
- Red pepperA tablespoon of finely diced sweet red bell pepper, not cayenne: the quantity and the instruction to cut it finely point to a fresh pod, and the separately listed paprika supplies the warmth.
- ShallotOne small shallot yields well over the teaspoon called for; use only what is specified or it will dominate a sauce this small.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a medium-bodied sauce that coats the oysters. Add the strained liquor in stages off the boil, whisking, then simmer a minute or two to lose any raw flour taste before the oysters go in.
- Strain the liquorCheesecloth catches shell grit and fragments, which is worth doing even with jarred oysters. Top up to a full cup with water, not stock, or the beef extract will overwhelm it.
- The toast baseSmall rounds or squares of bread fried in butter on one side only, as the recipe specifies; frying one face keeps some crispness while the untouched face takes up the sauce.
- ServingAssemble at the last moment and serve immediately; the toast softens quickly. The recipe treats the cucumber pickle slices as a garnish, though their acidity also cuts the butter.
Naming a dish "a la Astor" was a piece of borrowed prestige: the Astor House and later the Waldorf-Astoria in New York were among the leading names in American hotel cooking, and cookbooks of the period often attached hotel and family names to recipes as a shorthand for fashionable. The dish itself belongs to a large family of creamed and sauced oyster preparations common in American household manuals of the period, when oysters were cheap, sold shucked by the quart in coastal cities, and eaten far more casually than now. The combination of Worcestershire sauce, lemon, vinegar and beef extract is characteristic of the era's taste for a savory, faintly meaty gravy on shellfish; commercial meat extracts had been on sale since Liebig's in the 1860s and Bovril from the later 1880s, so the ingredient is consistent with a late-nineteenth or early-twentieth-century date rather than fixing one.