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Russian Patties
1 pint oysters 3 tablespoons butter 4 1/2 tablespoons flour 1/2 cup chicken stock 1/2 cup cream 1/2 tablespoon vinegar 3/4 tablespoon lemon juice Yolks 2 eggs 1 tablespoon grated horseradish 2 tablespoon capers Salt and pepper Parboil oysters, drain, and reserve liquor; there should be one-half cup. Make sauce of butter, flour, stock, oyster liquor, and cream; add yolks of eggs, seasonings, and salt and pepper to taste. Add oysters, and as soon as oysters are heated, fill patty shells.
A creamed oyster filling for pastry shells, sharpened with horseradish, capers and acid. The whole thing comes together in about fifteen minutes once the shells are ready, so bake or warm those first.
- Do not overcook the oystersParboil means dropping them into their own liquor or a little water just until the edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes. They then go back into the finished sauce only long enough to heat through; any real simmering makes them tough and shrunken.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint weighs roughly a pound of shucked meat; the count varies greatly with size, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen. The half cup of reserved liquor is part of the sauce liquid, so do not discard it.
- Keep the yolks below a simmerOnce the two yolks go in, hold the pan at a bare steam and stir constantly. Pushed much past the high 170sF they can curdle into threads, though the flour in the sauce gives some protection. Tempering them first with a ladle of the hot sauce is the safest route.
- Add the acid last, off the heatThe recipe does not say when the vinegar and lemon juice go in. The amounts are small and a flour-bound sauce takes acid fairly well, but stirring them in at the end, off the burner, is the safer order.
- Butter and flourThree tablespoons butter to 4 1/2 tablespoons flour is a stiff roux by modern proportions, thickening about 1 1/2 cups of liquid to a heavy, spoon-coating consistency. That is deliberate for a patty filling, which must not run out of the shell, but thin it with a little more stock if it sets up like paste.
- Horseradish and capersGrated horseradish here means fresh root, grated at the last minute. Bottled prepared horseradish is already acidified, so use a scant tablespoon and cut back the vinegar. Drain and roughly chop the capers.
- Patty shellsThese are puff pastry vol-au-vent cases. Frozen commercial shells baked according to their package work perfectly well; bake them dry and fill only at the moment of serving, or the pastry goes soft.
- YieldEnough to fill six to eight standard patty shells, serving six as a first course or four as a light main dish.
"Russian" on an English-language menu of this period was a loose label, and often attached to horseradish, capers, sour cream or a mustard bite rather than to any genuine Russian dish; this filling, a plain French cream sauce given a sharp accent, reads that way. The dish also belongs to the American age of cheap oysters, when shucked oysters were sold by the pint and turned up creamed, scalloped, fried and in patties through the entree chapters of household cookbooks. Patty shells were a common vehicle for rich bound mixtures, convenient because the pastry could be baked in advance and filled at the last minute.