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Escalloped Oysters
fashion.- One pint of oysters, two tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of cream, salt and pepper, two tablespoons of oyster liquor.
Pick crumbs from a slice of bread. Put in bottom of baking dish first a thick layer of crumbs, then a layer of oysters with the cream and liquor, then a layer of crumbs, and a little melted butter.
Bake twenty-five minutes in center grate of oven.-Mrs H. C. Stimpson.
A spare, late-Victorian version of a dish that in most books runs to more butter and more cream. It works as written, but the original assumes knowledge of a wood or coal range and leaves the oven temperature to the cook.
- Oven heat"Center grate of oven" means the middle rack; the temperature is unstated. A dish of this kind was generally set in a fairly brisk oven, and something in the region of 400F suits the twenty-five minutes given; in a slack oven the crumbs may not colour in that time.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters are still sold by the pint. The count varies with size, roughly a dozen to two dozen, which fills a small gratin dish and serves two or three.
- Two layers onlyLayers -- Some nineteenth-century writers advise no more than two layers of oysters, with crumbs top and bottom; this recipe uses a single layer. A deeper dish leaves the middle oysters steaming in their own liquor while the top scorches.
- Bread crumbs, not cracker"Pick crumbs from a slice of bread" means soft crumbs picked from the interior of the loaf, not dried fine crumbs and not the cracker crumbs many American versions call for. Soft crumbs soak up the liquor.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through a fine sieve or cloth before using. Shucked oysters almost always carry shell fragments and grit in the liquor.
- Butter and creamTwo tablespoons of each is austere by modern standards; a little more butter over the top crumbs will help them brown evenly rather than drying out in patches.
- DonenessTwenty-five minutes at the higher heat is about right for a shallow two-layer dish: the oysters should be just plump with their edges ruffled. Oysters overcook fast, so if the crumbs are browned at twenty minutes take it out.
- SaltSeason lightly. Oyster liquor is salty on its own, and the dish concentrates as it bakes.
Escalloped oysters were long a fixture of American cooking, and improvements in transport eventually made shellfish an everyday food far from the coast. The name is generally traced to the scallop shells once used as individual baking dishes, a usage that is said to have long outlived the shells themselves. Recipes like this one, contributed by a named subscriber, were the backbone of magazine kitchen pages: such publications gathered dishes from their readers, printed them with attribution, and in doing so preserved a picture of what ordinary households actually cooked rather than what professional chefs proposed. The extreme brevity here is typical of that contributor form, and it assumes a reader who already knows how her own oven behaves.