Home › Shellfish › Oyster Loaf
Oyster Loaf
Prepare a fresh loaf of baker's bread by cutting out a square from one end and tearing out the inside, as whole as possible. When but a shell is left, butter it well inside. Wash and drain a quantity of fine oysters, according to the size of the loaf, and fill it exactly as you would a dish for scalloped oysters, seasoning in layers with butter, pepper and salt, but omitting the crumbs. Replace the end of the loaf, rub the outside lightly with butter, set in a dripping pan and bake for about half an hour-a little longer than in a dish. The loaf will swell enough to keep the "lid" in place.
Serve on a long platter in a border of cress. Probably as you try to cut it, it will crush to a savory mass. Make pulled bread of the inside of the loaf and dry in the oven.-Anne Warner.
A hollowed loaf baked full of oysters, from an era when the bread itself was the baking dish. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how scalloped oysters go together.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right here: hot enough to crisp the crust and set the oyster liquor, not so hot that the shell scorches before the centre is hot.
- The hinge: drain the oysters hardShucked oysters release a great deal of liquor, and inside a bread shell there is nowhere for it to go. Drain them in a colander several minutes and blot them, or the bottom crust dissolves and the loaf collapses before it reaches the table.
- Quantity"A quantity of fine oysters, according to the size of the loaf" comes to roughly 1 pint (perhaps a dozen to twenty shucked oysters, depending on size) for a standard bakery loaf. Buy them shucked in their liquor from a fish counter and use them the day you get them.
- Choose the loafYou want a sturdy crusty white loaf, not sandwich bread. Cut the square from one end rather than slicing the top off, as directed, so the crust stays continuous and holds together under the weight of filling.
- Timing and the oystersOysters themselves need only two or three minutes; the half hour here is heating the loaf through. The recipe gives a flat half hour, but take it out as soon as the crust colours, or the oysters shrink and turn firm.
- Pulled breadThe torn-out crumb, pulled into rough pieces and dried in a low oven (about 300F) until crisp and pale gold, is a period side to serve alongside. It takes 20-30 minutes and is worth doing while the loaf bakes.
- CressThe "border of cress" is watercress or garden cress, used raw as a peppery garnish. Arugula or watercress from a supermarket serves the same purpose.
- Yield and servingOne loaf feeds three or four as a main course. Cut it in thick wedges with a serrated knife and accept, as Anne Warner does, that it will not hold its shape; serve it with a spoon onto warm plates.
The oyster loaf belongs to the long American period when oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten by everyone, and cooks looked for ways to serve a great many of them at once. Versions turn up across nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century books: sometimes the hollowed loaf is fried in butter and filled with fried oysters, sometimes, as here, it is stuffed raw and baked. The best-known descendant is the New Orleans la mediatrice or "peacemaker," a hollowed loaf of oysters that a man was said, by tradition rather than any record, to carry home to a wife kept waiting; the same idea eventually settled into the oyster po'boy. The recipe carries a signed attribution to Anne Warner, and the closing note about pulled bread reflects a household economy in which the inside of the loaf was never simply thrown away.