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Lemon-juice, Salt, and Cayenne
Put the oysters into a stewpan with their liquor, and bring them to the boil. Strain the liquor into a basin. Remove the beards and the hard parts of the oysters, and cut the soft parts into two pieces. Melt the butter in a stewpan, add the flour, then the oyster liquor, and boil the sauce five minutes. Add the cream, salt, cayenne, lemon-juice, and pieces of oysters.
This is oyster sauce for boiled fowl or fish, printed with its ingredient list detached from the method. Quantities are missing entirely, so treat the numbers below as the standard Victorian proportions for this sauce rather than as the author's own.
- The missing quantitiesThe original page gives none. A workable reconstruction for a dozen oysters is about 1 oz butter to 1 oz flour, the strained oyster liquor as the liquid (eked out if it falls short), and a few tablespoons of cream, with salt, cayenne and lemon juice to taste. These figures are the reviser's, not the author's.
- The hinge: cook the oysters twice as little as you thinkThe hinge: cook the oysters as little as you can -- The original says to bring them to the boil in their liquor, which is enough to firm them for bearding and cutting; in practice lifting them as the liquor trembles is kinder. The recipe returns them to the finished sauce at the very end, and they need only warming through, or they toughen.
- Boil the sauce, not the oystersThe five minutes' boiling applies to the roux and liquor alone, and it matters: it cooks out the raw flour taste and lets the sauce thicken properly. Add the cream after that and keep it below a boil.
- Beards and hard partsThe beard is the frilled mantle edge, the hard part the adductor muscle. Both are edible but chewy. Note the order in the original: the liquor is strained first, and straining through muslin is worth doing, as oyster liquor can carry grit.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan with a lid. Any modern saucepan does, but choose a heavy-based one so the roux does not catch.
- CayenneHere it is a seasoning rather than a source of heat: a pinch on the point of a knife is enough to sharpen the cream without reading as chilli.
- Lemon lastThe original adds the juice at the end, after the cream. Stir it in gently and off a hard boil, a little at a time, tasting as you go.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities, roughly 1/2 pint, enough for about four as a sauce for boiled fowl or white fish. The original states neither yield nor accompaniment.
Oyster sauce in the British sense has nothing to do with the fermented Cantonese condiment; it is a plain white or cream sauce enriched with oysters and their liquor, and it was a common partner to boiled fowl and boiled cod on nineteenth-century tables. Oysters were for much of the century cheap and plentiful enough to be used in quantity rather than as a luxury, and period cookery writers order them by the barrel. The decline of the native beds through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is usually credited with pushing this sauce off the ordinary menu. The method as printed is a French one worked in an English kitchen: a roux, a liquor, a cream liaison, and a final correction of acid and pepper, set out in working order.