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Club House Oysters
Three tablespoons of butter, four tablespoons of flour, one and one-half teaspoons of mustard, one-half teaspoon of paprika, one teaspoon of parsley, one teaspoon of salt, one and one-half cups of oyster liquid, two tablespoons of lemon juice, two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, one pint of oysters. Melt butter, add other ingredients in order given and cook until oysters are plump. Serve on hot buttered toast with pimolas. If a more highly seasoned dish is desired, soak the oysters in French dressing for half an hour before cooking.
A creamed-oyster dish built on a butter-and-flour roux thickened with oyster liquor rather than milk, so it tastes emphatically of the sea. Almost everything here is straightforward; the timing is where it goes wrong.
- Stop at plumpOysters are done when the edges ruffle and they swell, which takes about two minutes in a simmering sauce. Held longer they contract into rubber and weep liquid that thins the sauce.
- Oyster liquidThis is the liquor drained from the shucked oysters, strained through a fine sieve or cloth to catch shell grit. A pint of oysters rarely yields a cup and a half; make up the difference with bottled clam juice or a light fish stock rather than water.
- A pint of oystersSold by volume in the period and still sold that way in tubs today: on the order of sixteen to twenty-four medium shucked oysters depending on grade, and rather less than a pound once drained. Enough for about four on toast.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared. Whisk it into the roux with the flour so it disperses; dropped into hot liquid it clumps.
- Order of operations"Add other ingredients in order given" means cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before the liquid goes in, then add the oysters last, off the boil. Lemon juice and Worcestershire early can make the sauce taste flat if reduced hard.
- PimolasA trade name of the era for pimiento-stuffed green olives. Sliced, they garnish the toast; any stuffed Spanish olive does the job.
- SaltA full teaspoon plus oyster liquor plus two tablespoons of Worcestershire is a great deal of salt. Season at the end instead, after tasting the finished sauce.
- French dressingIn American books of this date that means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, not a sweet orange bottled dressing. Drain the oysters well after the half-hour soak or the sauce will break.
Dishes labelled "club house" or "club style" turn up throughout American cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, borrowing prestige from the men's city clubs. Butter, flour, oyster liquor and a hard jolt of Worcestershire and mustard, assembled in a few minutes and spooned over toast. Oysters were cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast in this period, sold shucked by the pint and treated less as a luxury than as a weekday protein, which is why cook books of the era carry whole chapters of them creamed, scalloped, fried, panned and stewed. The heavy hand with mustard, paprika and Worcestershire reflects a fashion for "devilled" seasoning that ran through club and hotel cooking, and the instruction to soak the oysters in French dressing for a still sharper result shows how far that taste could be pushed.