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Salt and Cayenne (Cook the flour well)
Cook the flour well in the butter, then add one gill of boiling oyster liquor, the cream, lemon-juice, salt and cayenne and the yolks of egg; stir these all well together till it thickens.
Take the beards off the oysters, cut each of them into four pieces and stir them into the mixture, also the mushrooms chopped up. Turn this out on a dish to cool. Divide this mixture into portions of equal size, egg and bread-crumb them, form into nice-shaped cutlets, fry them in boiling fat, and dish-up with fried parsley. Serve with oyster sauce made as follows :- Ingredients.
This is the method half of a Victorian oyster cutlet — a stiff panada bound with yolks, studded with oysters and mushrooms, then crumbed and fried. The page begins mid-recipe and breaks off at the sauce, so quantities for the flour, butter, cream and oysters are not given here; treat it as a technique to be scaled against a modern croquette recipe.
- The hinge: chill until firm"Turn this out on a dish to cool" is doing more work than it looks. The mixture must be spread thin and refrigerated until genuinely cold and stiff — an hour or two — or the cutlets will slump in the crumbs and burst in the fat.
- A gillA British gill is 5 fl oz, a quarter of an imperial pint, or roughly two-thirds of a US cup. American books of the same era usually mean 4 fl oz, half a cup.
- Oyster liquorThe strained liquid from the shells. If your oysters are shucked into tubs there may be little of it; make up the volume with fish stock rather than water, and strain through muslin to catch grit.
- Do not boil after the yolks go inStir over gentle heat only until the panada thickens and pulls from the pan. Once the yolks are in, a hard boil will make the mixture grainy.
- BeardsThe dark frill along the edge of the oyster. On small modern oysters it is usually left alone; on large ones trim it, as it stays chewy while the body cooks in seconds.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature. "Boiling fat" means fat hot enough to seize the crumb at once, which in modern terms is somewhere around 350-375F. The mixture is already cooked through apart from the oysters stirred in at the end, so you are chiefly browning the coating -- two to three minutes, turning once.
- Fried parsleyDry curly parsley sprigs thoroughly, or they will spit violently. A few seconds in the same fat turns them brittle and bright green; longer and they go black.
- Yield and servingNo quantities appear on this page. Scaled to something like 2 oz each of butter and flour with a pint of oysters, a mixture of this kind would make roughly eight to ten cutlets, enough for four as a first course. Serve straight from the pan with the oyster sauce the recipe goes on to describe.
Oyster cutlets belong to the last stretch of the period when oysters were cheap enough in Britain to be minced into a binding sauce rather than served on the half shell. Croquette and cutlet cookery — a thick roux panada, chilled, shaped, crumbed and deep-fried — came into British kitchens through French professional practice and is often said to have been a fixture of the cookery-school syllabus, since it taught roux, liaison with yolks, panée coating and deep frying in one exercise. Shaping the mixture into a chop-like "cutlet" was a conceit of the day; grand versions had a scrap of macaroni or a mushroom stalk pushed in at the narrow end to imitate the bone.