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Creamed Oysters
Make a thick White Sauce according to the recipe on page 21, and add a slight flavoring of onion. Put the blazer into the hot-water pan, and the oysters into the cream sauce. Cook until plump and serve on toast, in crustades or paté shells.
A chafing-dish recipe: the whole thing hangs on gentle heat and a short cooking time. Read the oyster timing note before anything else.
- Cook the oysters two minutes, not moreShucked oysters are done the moment the edges ruffle and they turn opaque, roughly one to two minutes in hot sauce. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery, and they weep liquor that thins the sauce.
- The blazer and hot-water panThe blazer is the top pan of a chafing dish; the hot-water pan sits beneath it as a bain-marie. Any heatproof bowl or saucepan over barely simmering water does the same job and gives you the low, indirect heat the recipe assumes.
- Thick white sauceThe recipe sends you to Estes's page-21 white sauce, presumably a roux-and-milk sauce of the usual kind; the page is not reproduced here. For a thick version the usual modern proportion is about 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour to a cup of milk or cream, which allows for the liquid the oysters will release.
- Slight flavoring of onionA common period method was to steep a slice of onion or a piece of shallot in the milk and strain it out, or rub the pan with a cut onion. A grated teaspoon of onion cooked into the roux works; raw onion pieces will dominate.
- Drain the oysters firstLift them from their liquor and drain well before adding, or the sauce breaks down to soup. The reserved liquor can be strained and used to thin the sauce at the end if it stiffens.
- Crustades and paté shellsA crustade is a hollowed, fried or baked bread case; paté shells are baked puff-pastry vol-au-vents. Modern equivalents are toast points, puff-pastry cases, or a split baking-powder biscuit.
- Season at the endOysters are salty and the amount varies by source. Hold back the salt until the oysters have gone in, then correct with salt, white pepper and a few drops of lemon.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Working from a pint of shucked oysters and a cup of sauce, expect four servings as a light course, two as a supper dish.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author; Estes was born enslaved in Tennessee and spent his working life cooking on Pullman dining cars and later for the executives of a Chicago steel company. The recipe belongs to the chafing-dish craze that swept American entertaining from the 1890s into the 1910s — the blazer-and-hot-water-pan apparatus let a hostess cook at the table without a kitchen, and cookbooks of the era carried whole chapters of these quick creamed and curried dishes. Oysters were then cheap and abundant along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, shipped inland packed in ice by the same railroads Estes worked on, which is why they appear in American recipes of the period with a casualness that reads as luxury now. Serving them in a rich white sauce on toast or in pastry cases was the standard treatment for a late supper or a ladies' luncheon.