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Panned Oysters
Wash the oysters. Take one-half cup of butter and brown it. Cook the oysters in the butter. Beat the yolks of two eggs, add half a cup of milk and half a tablespoon of cornstarch. Mix all together, let come to a boil, and pour over toast for serving. This is for one can of oysters. Mrs S. M. Jones.
A late-Victorian chafing-dish standby: oysters warmed in browned butter, bound with an egg-and-milk sauce and spooned over toast. The instructions assume more cooking sense than they state, and two steps need attention.
- The hinge: do not boil the sauce hard"Let come to a boil" with two egg yolks in it will scramble the sauce if taken literally over direct heat. Bring it just to the first shiver of a simmer, stirring constantly, and pull it as soon as it coats a spoon; the cornstarch is there to give the yolks a little insurance, not a licence to boil.
- Temper the eggsBeat the yolks with the cold milk and cornstarch first, then stir a ladle of the hot buttery oyster liquor into that mixture before returning it all to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to a hot pan of browned butter is the fastest route to curdling.
- "One can of oysters"Canned oyster sizes varied in the period, so the quantity here is uncertain; a modern 8 oz can, or about a half-pint of shucked fresh oysters, is a reasonable stand-in. Canned oysters are already cooked through, so they need only to be heated in the butter, about a minute.
- Fresh oysters cook in two minutesIf you substitute shucked fresh oysters, they are done the moment the edges ruffle and curl, roughly 1 to 2 minutes. Anything past that turns them tight and rubbery, and no amount of sauce recovers them.
- Half a cup of butterThat is a full stick, and it is generous by modern standards for one small can of oysters. Two to three tablespoons browned to a nut colour gives the same flavour without the sauce breaking into a butter slick.
- Browning the butterCook it over medium heat until the milk solids go golden and it smells of hazelnut, then use it immediately. Butter goes from browned to burnt in well under a minute, and burnt butter will dominate the oysters.
- Seasoning is left to youThe recipe names none. Salt, white pepper and a few drops of lemon or a dash of cayenne bring the dish into focus; taste after the oyster liquor goes in, as it carries its own salt.
- YieldServes two as a light supper or four small portions on toast points. Dry the toast well, or the sauce will soak straight through it.
"Panned" oysters belong to the same family as scalloped, creamed and fried oysters that fill the shellfish chapters of American cookbooks from the 1870s through the 1920s, when oysters were cheap urban food rather than a luxury, and rail and canning had put them on tables far from the coast. The canned oyster this recipe assumes is the giveaway: Chesapeake packers shipped tinned oysters inland in great quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, which is how a dish native to seaboard oyster cellars became something a housekeeper in Ohio could put together at home. The egg-yolk-and-milk binding, thickened with a little cornstarch, is the standard household sauce of the period, and serving anything rich over toast was the era's default answer to the question of what to do for a light supper or a Sunday tea. The attribution to Mrs S. M. Jones marks this as a contributed recipe, of the kind gathered from readers and club members.