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Creamed Oysters with Celery
Clean one pint of oysters and cook them in their own liquor until they are plump. Drain, then strain the oyster liquor and add to it enough thin cream to make one and a half cups. Melt in the chafing-dish three tablespoons of butter, add five tablespoons of flour and stir to a paste. Pour in the liquid gradually, and beat till creamy. Season with pepper, salt and celery salt. Add the parboiled oysters and cook till just at the boiling point. This may be poured over slices of buttered toast, then sprinkle with very finely chopped celery. If plain creamed oysters are desired, leave out the celery and celery salt, and if toast is not obtainable, the dish is excellent served with bread and butter sandwiches. -I. G. C.
A chafing-dish supper dish that comes together in about fifteen minutes, provided the oysters are treated gently. Everything here depends on not overcooking them.
- The hinge: oysters plump, then stopOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they firm slightly — roughly one to two minutes in their liquor. The recipe then returns them to the sauce only until it reaches boiling point; take it off there. Any sustained simmering shrinks them into rubber and clouds the sauce.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is 16 fl oz — depending on grade, somewhere around 20 to 30 oysters — and will serve three or four over toast.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" in this period is closest to today's light cream, around 18-20% fat; half-and-half is thinner but will serve. Whole milk works and gives a lighter sauce; heavy cream will need thinning or the roux quantity reduced.
- The roux is deliberately heavyThree tablespoons butter to five tablespoons flour for a cup and a half of liquid gives a very thick sauce — closer to a filling than a pouring sauce. If you want something that flows over toast, use three tablespoons of flour and hold the rest back.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor carries grit and bits of shell. Pour it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before measuring, then top up with cream to reach 1½ cups.
- Chafing dishThe original assumes a chafing dish worked at the table over a spirit lamp. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat does the same job; the virtue of the chafing dish was gentle, easily controlled heat — with the hot-water pan in place, gentler still — which is what oysters want.
- Celery salt and fresh celeryCelery salt is still sold and is potent — season the sauce with it before adding ordinary salt. The raw chopped celery scattered on top is not garnish; it supplies the crunch the dish otherwise lacks.
Creamed oysters belong to the chafing-dish craze that ran through American middle-class entertaining from the 1890s into the 1920s, when a spirit lamp and a pan on the sideboard let a hostess cook supper in front of her guests without a servant in the room. Oysters were the natural material: cheap, abundant, sold shucked by the pint, and quick enough to cook that nothing could go wrong in company — provided, as here, they were barely heated. The celery pairing was a period habit; celery was itself a somewhat fashionable vegetable, often served raw in tall glass vases on the dinner table, and celery salt was commercially available by this date. The initials "I. G. C." suggest a reader contribution.