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Twelve Oysters (Round Cro tons)
Twelve round Croûtons.
Twelve pieces of very thin Bacon, 2 inches long, 1½ inch wide.
Beard and trim each oyster, put one on each piece of bacon, sprinkle over the oyster a little cayenne and two or three drops of lemon-juice; then roll it up in the bacon. Lay each roll of bacon and oyster on a croûton, put them into a brisk oven just to cook the bacon, serve very hot, dished up on watercress.
This is the Victorian savoury usually called angels on horseback, given here in its most compact form. The whole thing hinges on the bacon crisping before the oyster overcooks, so everything else should be ready before the tray goes in.
- Brisk oven"Brisk" is generally taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C); Victorian oven terms were relative, not fixed. At that heat the bacon should colour in roughly 6-8 minutes; the oyster inside needs only to firm and plump. Longer and it shrinks to a rubbery bead.
- CroûtonsHere a croûton means a round of bread about the diameter of the roll, cut with a small cutter and fried in clarified butter until crisp and pale gold, then drained. Toasted rounds work but drink up the oyster liquor and go soft.
- BeardingBearding is removing the frilly dark mantle and any grit or fragment of shell from a shucked oyster. Modern shucked oysters are usually already clean, but check each one and pat it dry so the bacon can crisp.
- The baconUse thin streaky bacon, not back, and stretch each piece with the back of a knife before rolling. Thick-cut modern rashers will not render in the time the oyster can stand; if that is all you have, blanch or part-cook them first.
- Securing the rollsThe original assumes the bacon will hold. A short cocktail stick through each roll keeps it shut and makes turning easier; remove before serving or leave in if they are being handed round.
- Cayenne and lemonBoth are correctives to the fat and the sweetness of the oyster. A very small pinch of cayenne per oyster is enough; the lemon juice should be drops, not a squeeze, or it will pool on the croûton.
- Yield and serviceTwelve rolls serve four to six as a savoury or a dozen as canapés. They must go to the table straight from the oven, on the watercress, which wilts slightly under them and is meant to be eaten.
Oysters wrapped in bacon and grilled or baked belong to the savoury, the small hot salted course that closed a formal English dinner after the sweets and before dessert — a purely British arrangement that puzzled French cooks and largely vanished with the multi-course dinner itself. The dish is generally known as angels on horseback, a name usually explained as a rendering of the French anges à cheval, with devils on horseback (prunes or dates in bacon) as its sweet counterpart. That oysters could be treated so casually, a dozen used up as a twelve-bite garnish, says a good deal about their price before overfishing depleted the beds of the Thames estuary and the Solent from the 1860s and 1870s, with the typhoid scares traced to sewage-contaminated beds following at the very end of the century and into the 1900s.