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Twenty-four Oysters
Half a pint of White Sauce.
One glass of Sherry.
One tablespoonful of Anchovy Sauce.
One ounce of Butter.
Cayenne. Salt. Melt the butter in a saucepan, put in the onion and fry it a little. Then add all the other ingredients, except the chicken and the oysters, and boil the sauce for about five minutes. Lastly put in the fowl cut into neat joints, and the oysters blanched and bearded, cook slowly about ten minutes and serve.
A late-Victorian ragout of cooked fowl and oysters in a fortified white sauce, from the curry chapter and so almost certainly seasoned with curry powder. The quantities that survive are workable if you treat the sauce as the fixed element and scale the meat to it.
- The hinge: add the oysters lastTen minutes in simmering sauce will shrink them to erasers. Blanch and beard them, then slide them in for the final minute or two, off the boil, just to heat through.
- Half a pint of white sauceAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The recipe does not specify how it is made; take it as a plain white sauce, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon before the sherry thins it.
- One glass of sherryA wine glass in this period is roughly 2 fl oz. Use a dry sherry such as fino or amontillado; a cream sherry makes the sauce cloying against the anchovy.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled thin brown sauce, now uncommon but still made. A scant teaspoon of anchovy paste mashed into the sauce, or a tablespoon of Worcestershire, gives a comparable salted-fish depth. Salt at the very end, since both the anchovy and the oyster liquor bring their own.
- Blanched and beardedBearding means trimming off the dark frill of gill tissue around the oyster's edge. Open them over a bowl, keep the liquor and strain it into the sauce, and dip the oysters in their own hot liquor for a few seconds rather than in water.
- "Boil the sauce for about five minutes"Simmer rather than boil, to cook the raw alcohol out of the sherry and let the flour finish. A rolling boil in a milk-based sauce catches on the pan bottom.
- The fowlThis is a dish for meat already cooked — the remains of a boiled or roast bird. Reckon on 1½ to 2 lb of jointed cooked chicken for this quantity of sauce, and give it long enough only to come up to serving heat.
- Yield and serviceServes four as written, with plain boiled rice.
Oysters and poultry were a standard Victorian pairing, and this is a thrifty version of it: the sauce is built in one pan and the meat that goes in is yesterday's bird. Oysters were cheap in Britain in the earlier and middle decades of the nineteenth century, sold by the barrel and treated as a bulking ingredient rather than a luxury, which is why a recipe like this can call for two dozen without comment; by the 1880s and 1890s the native beds were in serious decline and prices were climbing.