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Some Lemon-juice
Cayenne. Blanch the oysters in their own liquor (keep the liquor), then beard the oysters and cut them in half. Melt the butter, add the flour, and cook carefully for two or three minutes; then add the oyster liquor and fish stock. Stir till it boils, add the cream and seasonings, put in the oysters, and, when quite hot, fill the patty cases and serve. ( 141 )
This page has been split mid-recipe: the heading and the opening line are the tail end of an ingredient list, so quantities for the butter, flour, cream and stock are missing. What survives is a standard oyster patty filling, and the method is complete enough to follow if you supply your own proportions.
- The missing quantitiesFor a filling of this type, roughly 1 oz butter to 1 oz flour to ½ pint of combined oyster liquor and fish stock, finished with 2-3 tablespoons cream, will bind about a dozen and a half oysters. Treat this as a reconstruction, not the author's figures, which are not on the page.
- Blanching is not cookingBring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges begin to ruffle, then lift them out at once. They finish in the hot sauce. Oysters held at a simmer tighten and turn rubbery within a minute or two, and this recipe deliberately reheats them only at the end.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frill of gill tissue around the oyster's edge. Pinch or trim it away after blanching, when it firms up and separates easily. With small modern oysters you can often skip halving them.
- Save every drop of liquorThe strained blanching liquor is the main flavour in the sauce; fish stock is only there to make up the volume. Strain it through muslin, as oyster liquor almost always carries grit and shell fragments.
- Cook the roux, but keep it paleTwo to three minutes over gentle heat is enough to lose the raw flour taste without colouring it. This is a white sauce; browning the flour would fight the oysters.
- SeasoningsCayenne appears on the page and lemon juice in the heading; because the ingredient list is cut off, other seasonings may have been listed above. A pinch of cayenne and a few drops of juice, added off the heat, suit the dish; add the lemon after the cream, since acid dropped into a hot cream sauce can make it grain.
- Patty casesPatty cases of this period were normally baked puff-pastry shells, made in advance. Warm the empty cases briefly in a moderate oven and fill them at the moment of serving; filled pastry collapses into sogginess very quickly. No temperature is given on the page.
- YieldNo quantities survive on the page, so the yield cannot be taken from the text; on the reconstructed proportions above the mixture would suit eight to twelve small patties, served hot as an entree course of one or two per person.
Oyster patties were a fixture of British entrée courses through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap enough to be a filling rather than a luxury and puff-pastry cases could be turned out by the dozen in a professional kitchen. The pattern here — blanch, beard, thicken the liquor, return the oysters at the last moment — appears in cookery manuals across the period with little variation, and the small refinements are what mark out a careful book: the liquor kept and used rather than poured away, the roux cooked out, the seasoning reduced to cayenne and lemon. Bearding fell out of general practice, but in a hot sauce the gills stay chewy and the older cooks were right to remove them.