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Twelve Oysters (Half a pound of Puff Paste)
Half a pound of Puff Paste.
One gill of Béchamel Sauce.
One ounce of grated Parmesan Cheese.
Cayenne. Roll the paste out very thin, and cut it out with a round cutter the size of a five-shilling piece; take the beards off the oysters, put one oyster on each piece of paste, cover it over with a spoonful of Béchamel sauce; sprinkle with a little grated cheese and cayenne. Bake in a quick oven, and serve with fried parsley in the centre.
Macaroni à l'Américaine.
Ingredients.
Quarter pound of Macaroni.
One ounce of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Half a pint of Tomato Purée.
Pepper, Salt, and a little Sugar to taste.
Boil the macaroni in water with a little salt till quite tender, then strain, and wash it in cold water and cut it in small pieces. Melt the butter, add the flour and half a pint of purée of tomato, add seasoning, let it boil well, season to taste; then stir in the macaroni and make it hot. Dish it up on a hot dish, serve some croûtons of fried bread, and sprinkle a few brown bread-crumbs on top.
Two savouries share this page: oyster tartlets built on rounds of puff paste, and a macaroni dressed in tomato-thickened béchamel-style sauce. Both are late-Victorian dinner-service items meant to arrive hot and in quantity.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or a scant 2/3 cup. Half a pint of tomato purée for the macaroni is 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 cups.
- The size of a five-shilling pieceA crown measured about 1 1/2 inches across. Use a 3.5-4 cm round cutter; half a pound of thinly rolled paste yields many more rounds than the twelve oysters require, so re-roll or reserve the surplus.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. The point is to puff and colour the paste fast, in something like ten minutes, before the oyster overcooks and the sauce dries out. Bake on parchment and serve within minutes.
- Beards, and shuckingThe "beard" is the dark frill of gill tissue at the edge of the oyster. Buy oysters live in the shell and shuck them, or ask the fishmonger to; drain them well or the paste will go soggy under the sauce.
- Puff pasteReady-rolled all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute. Roll it thinner than it comes, chill the cut rounds before topping, and do not let the sauce run over the edges or the layers will not rise.
- Tomato puréeHere this means a thin sieved tomato sauce, not the concentrated tube paste sold under that name today. Use passata, or fresh tomatoes cooked down and sieved. Modern concentrate would need thinning by roughly four to one.
- Washing the macaroniRinsing boiled pasta in cold water is out of favour now because it strips the starch that helps sauce cling. It does keep the cut pieces from clumping while the sauce is made, so if you rinse, drain thoroughly and reheat in the sauce for a minute or two.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs of curly parsley, dried completely, dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldThe oysters give twelve small savouries, one or two a head at the end of a formal dinner. The macaroni serves three or four as a light course.
Savouries occupied their own course in the late nineteenth-century English dinner, served after the sweet and before dessert fruit, and they were expected to be small, sharply seasoned and hot: anchovy, cheese, roe or oyster on a bite of pastry or toast. Oysters had been cheap and plentiful in Britain earlier in the century, though supplies and prices were tightening as the beds declined; a recipe that spends twelve at a time still treats them as a garnish rather than a luxury. The tag "à l'Américaine" on the macaroni is generally taken to signal a tomato dressing rather than any documented dish from the United States, though the reason for the name is not settled; the same label turns up on lobster and on eggs in French kitchen writing of the era with quite different meanings.