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Stewed Oysters
Ingredients.
Twenty-four Oysters. One and a half ounce of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
One gill of Milk.
One gill of Cream.
A small blade of Mace.
What survives here is the sauce, not the shellfish: the list gives the béchamel base and its seasoning but omits the oysters themselves, their liquor, and any method. Read it as the framework for a classic white oyster stew and supply the rest from practice.
- The gillIn imperial measure a gill is 5 fl oz (150 ml), not the American half-cup of 4 fl oz. Read that way, the sauce is built on 10 fl oz of liquid in total, half milk and half cream, though nothing in the list itself confirms which convention was intended.
- ProportionsAn ounce of flour to 1½ oz butter and 10 fl oz of liquid gives a fairly thick coating sauce, which suits a dish where the oysters will release their own liquor and thin it. Strain that liquor through muslin and count it as part of the liquid rather than adding it on top.
- The missing oystersNothing in the list says how many. For 10 fl oz of sauce, something like two to three dozen shucked oysters would be a workable amount for four as a course, but the figure is a reconstruction, not the book's.
- The hinge: barely cook themOysters go in at the very end, off a rolling heat, and need only a minute or two until the edges ruffle. Anything approaching a real simmer shrinks them to rubber and clouds the sauce.
- Blade of maceA blade is a whole flake of the lacy aril around the nutmeg, infused in the warming milk and lifted out before serving. Ground mace is not the same thing; if you substitute, use a pinch and expect a grittier, more assertive sauce.
- Building the sauceCook the butter and flour together two or three minutes without colour — a white roux — then add the warmed milk and cream gradually. Any browning ruins the pale finish this dish depends on.
- SeasoningThe list gives none. Oyster liquor is salty, so salt last; cayenne and a squeeze of lemon are the period-appropriate finish.
- ServingServe hot in a deep dish with fingers of dry toast or puff-paste croûtes. It will not hold — the sauce skins and the oysters toughen if kept warm.
Earlier and mid-nineteenth-century cookery treated oysters as everyday rather than luxurious: dredged in quantity from the Firth of Forth, the Thames estuary and the Essex and Kentish beds, they were cheap enough to pad out steak pies and to appear routinely in the fish course of a middle-class dinner. The native beds were badly depleted by the 1880s and 1890s, however, and prices rose. Mace in a cream sauce for shellfish is an older habit still, generally traced to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English kitchen, where mace rather than pepper was the standard warm spice for white sauces and fish stews.