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Filling for Oyster Patties
Ingredients.
Three-quarters of an ounce of Flour.
Three-quarters of an ounce of Butter.
Half a gill of Oyster Liquor (eighteen Oysters). Cayenne.
Half a gill of Fish Stock.
Half a gill of Cream.
This is a proportion table rather than a full method: a small white roux-based sauce, bound with oyster liquor, fish stock and cream, into which the oysters are folded before filling baked pastry cases. The book assumes you already know how to make a velouté.
- A gill is half a cupA gill is a quarter of a pint — 5 fl oz imperial, so half a gill is about 2½ fl oz (roughly 70 ml), and the three liquids together come to about 7½ fl oz. (Under the American gill of 4 fl oz the figures would be 2 fl oz and 6 fl oz.) Either way the flour gives a sauce thick enough to sit in pastry without running.
- Weigh the rouxThree-quarters of an ounce is 21 g of each — roughly 1½ tablespoons butter and 2½ tablespoons plain flour. Equal weights, not equal volumes, is the point; measuring flour by spoon will thicken it unpredictably.
- The method the book leaves outMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two without colouring, then add the warmed liquids gradually. Simmer until it coats a spoon, and only then add the oysters.
- Oysters go in last, off the heatEighteen oysters heated through in the finished sauce need a minute at most; the residual heat of the sauce is nearly enough. Anything approaching a simmer turns them tough and squeezes out water that thins the sauce.
- Oyster liquorStrain the liquor released when you open the oysters through muslin to catch shell grit. The recipe treats eighteen oysters as yielding the half gill it wants; actual yield varies, so measure what you get and make up any shortfall with stock.
- Fish stockA light fumet from white fish bones simmered 20 minutes, not a long-boiled brown stock. Bottled clam juice or a mild fish stock will do, but taste before salting — the oyster liquor is already saline.
- YieldSomewhere between 8 and 10 fl oz of filling once the oysters are in, depending on how the gill is read; enough for roughly a dozen small puff-pastry patty cases or six larger ones. Fill them just before serving so the pastry stays crisp.
Oyster patties were a standard late-Victorian entrée, and the form tells you a good deal about the period's kitchens: puff-pastry cases were baked in quantity in advance, and a cook kept a repertoire of small bound fillings — oyster, lobster, sweetbread, chicken — to spoon into them at the last moment. Oysters had long been treated as a bulk ingredient rather than a luxury, though native stocks were already in serious decline and prices rising from the 1860s–70s; their eventual move from the everyday entrée column to the raw half-shell is often attributed in part to the typhoid scares of the 1890s and after, but the record supports no single cause. The recipe's structure, a measured white roux extended with three liquids in equal parts, is the French velouté taught in the professional English kitchens of the day, which is also why the page lists proportions and no instructions: the reader was expected to have the sauce by heart.