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Pepper and Salt (Blanch and beard the oysters)
Blanch and beard the oysters and cut each into four. Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs, beat the yolks a little, and add the oysters and pepper and salt. Whip the whites to a stiff froth and stir lightly to the yolks. Put the mixture into the omelet-pan for two or three minutes over the fire, stirring all the time.
A soufflé-style oyster omelette, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities, no yield, and the assumption that you already know how to handle a live oyster. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- Quantities are not givenThe original assumes a chef will scale it. A workable ratio is about 6 eggs to about 12 shucked oysters, serving two to three as a light course; much beyond two oysters per egg and the mixture is likely to be too wet to set well.
- Blanch means seconds, not minutesBring the oysters just to the point of firming in their own liquor — 30 seconds is enough — then lift them out. They finish cooking in the egg, and oysters held at a simmer turn to rubber very quickly.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frill of gill tissue around the edge of the oyster. Pinch or trim it away after blanching; it is edible but stringy and muddy-tasting in a delicate egg dish.
- Save the liquorReserve the liquor released during shucking and blanching. It is intensely savoury and can be reduced and spooned over the finished omelette rather than being thrown out with the blanching water.
- Folding the whitesThe hinge of the dish. Beat the yolks only lightly, fold the stiff whites in with a few strokes, and stop while streaks remain. Overmixing collapses the foam and you get scrambled eggs with oysters in them.
- "Stirring all the time" — but brieflyThe recipe does say to stir throughout, and gives no heat level and no fat. In practice two or three minutes over a moderate heat in a buttered pan, stirring for the first thirty seconds or so to set the base and then leaving it to puff, will better preserve the whipped whites; constant stirring for the full time works against them.
- SeasoningOysters and their liquor are already salty. Season the yolks lightly and taste before adding more; the recipe's title notwithstanding, this needs less salt than most omelettes.
- The panAn "omelet-pan" of the period was typically a shallow, sloping-sided iron pan, often reserved for eggs. A well-seasoned or non-stick pan of roughly 8 to 9 inches serves the same purpose at the quantities suggested above.
Oyster omelettes belong to a period when oysters were cheap enough to be a filling rather than a luxury — in the earlier and middle decades of the nineteenth century British beds supplied them abundantly, though the native beds were badly depleted from roughly the 1860s-70s onward and oysters became markedly dearer by the end of the century, and cookery books of the era treat them the way later books treat mushrooms, as a savoury bulking ingredient for pies, sauces, patties and egg dishes. The technique here, separating the eggs and folding in whipped whites, marks it as an omelette soufflée in the French manner rather than a plain folded omelette, which is what puts a simple oyster dish in a book of "high class" cookery: the skill on display is the foam, not the shellfish. The instruction to beard is routine in the writing of the time, appearing in domestic cookery books as well as professional ones.