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Panned Oysters
Use one quart of oysters. Heat the blazer and throw the oysters into it. Stir constantly until the gills curl and the liquid boils. Add two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt, one-eighth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper. Serve immediately.
A chafing-dish recipe of four lines, and nearly all of the skill lies in stopping soon enough. Everything else is seasoning.
- Watch the edges, not the clockThe "gills" are the ruffled mantle edges of the shucked oyster; they curl within about two minutes over direct heat. Once they have curled and the liquor has come to a boil, the oysters are done, and another minute turns them tight and rubbery.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame rather than over the hot-water bath below. Any wide, heavy skillet does the same job; a shallow pan lets the oyster liquor reduce rather than stew the oysters.
- A quart of oystersShucked oysters sold by volume, in their own liquor: roughly 24 to 36 medium oysters, or two of the standard 16-oz tubs. Drain off the excess liquor if the tub is very wet, or the dish poaches instead of pans.
- Larkin Table Salt and White PepperHouse-brand goods sold by the Larkin Company, not distinct ingredients. Use ordinary fine salt and ground white pepper, and season at the end after tasting, since oyster liquor is already salty and varies a good deal from batch to batch.
- Butter at the finishThe two tablespoons go in after the liquid has come to a boil rather than at the start. Swirl the pan rather than stirring hard once the butter is in.
- ServingThe recipe gives no accompaniment, though panned oysters were commonly spooned over dry toast or crackers, which take up the liquor. A quart serves four as a supper dish or six as a first course.
- SourcingBuy shucked oysters from a refrigerated case with a sell-by date and cook them the day you get them. Because they are brought to a boil here, they are cooked through, but oysters going off in the tub cannot be rescued by heat.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American homes between roughly 1890 and 1910, when a spirit lamp under a silvered pan made it possible to cook at the table without a kitchen, a servant, or much noise. It suited late suppers after the theatre, bachelor rooms, and college quarters, and cookbooks of the period often gave it its own chapter. Oysters were the chafing dish's staple because they were then relatively inexpensive, widely sold shucked by the quart in Eastern cities, and cooked in the two minutes a spirit lamp could reliably manage. The Larkin brand names in the ingredient list mark this as a promotional cookbook of the kind the Larkin Company of Buffalo circulated with its mail-order soap and household premiums, a common way for a firm to get its salt and pepper tins written into a household's daily habits.