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Deviled Oysters
Clean, drain and slightly chop one pint of oysters. Add to a sauce made from four tablespoons of butter, four tablespoons of flour and two-thirds of a cup of scalded milk. Add the yolk of one egg, half a teaspoon of salt, a dash of cayenne, one teaspoon of lemon juice and half a tablespoon of finely chopped parsley. Arrange buttered oyster shells in a dripping pan, half fill with the mixture and cover with buttered crumbs. Bake from twelve to fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Send to the table garnished with parsley and lemon points. - See Page XVIII.
A thick oyster panada baked back into the shells. The whole thing hinges on the sauce being stiff enough to sit in a shell without running out, then baked only long enough to brown the crumbs.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as 425-450F. At that heat the buttered crumbs colour in about twelve minutes, which is also all the time the oysters need.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure: one pint is two cups, somewhere between a dozen and twenty oysters depending on size, liquor included. Drain them but keep the liquor.
- The sauce is deliberately stiffFour tablespoons each of butter and flour to two-thirds cup of milk gives a very heavy binding sauce, not a pouring one. That is correct here; thin it and it will run out of the shells. Loosen it with a spoonful of the reserved oyster liquor only if it is unworkable.
- The egg yolkAdd it off the heat, once the sauce has stopped bubbling, or it will scramble in streaks. Stir the chopped oysters in at the same point so they are not cooked twice.
- Shells and panA dripping pan is a shallow roasting pan or rimmed baking sheet. Deep oyster shells are scarce now; scallop shells, small gratin dishes or 4-oz ramekins work. A bed of coarse salt in the pan keeps shells from tipping.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly two tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs. Dry commercial crumbs scorch before the filling is hot.
- Lemon pointsThin lengthwise lemon wedges cut to a point, a common garnish for fish and shellfish in this period.
- YieldEnough to half-fill roughly a dozen shells or half a dozen ramekins, on the order of a first course for six.
"Deviled" in American cookery of this period meant sharply seasoned rather than any particular method, and the tell here is the cayenne and lemon juice; earlier English deviled dishes leaned on mustard and pepper. Baking a rich bound mixture back into the shell was a common way of presenting a cheap, abundant ingredient as something composed on the plate. Oysters were still comparatively inexpensive in the eastern United States when this book was compiled, which is why cookbooks of the era carry whole chapters of them, and why the shells themselves were washed and reused rather than discarded.