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Some Kitchen Kinks: Make
Put the oysters in a bowl, add a little water, and rinse carefully, lifting each one out separately. Dry in a napkin. Make the cream, butter, and cornstarch into a smooth sauce, seasen with pepper and salt, and drop WHAT THE HOME NURSE OUGHT TO KNOW in the oysters. Cook until they begin to curl up at the edges, then pour over buttered toast.
Scalloped Oysters (Individual portion).- cupful of oysters; ½ cupful of cracker and bread crumbs mixed; 1 tablespoonful of butter; pepper and salt; 1 tablespoonful of cream; 1 tablespoonful of strained oyster liquor. Wash the oysters and lift them from the liquor. Mix the crumbs with the melted butter; scatter a layer of crumbs over a deep saucer. then a layer of oysters; sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with the rest of the crumbs. Pour over the cream and oyster liquor. Bake until the top is delicately browned. Serve hot.
Two invalid-food dishes for one person: creamed oysters on toast and a single-serving scallop. Both are quick, and both are ruined by the same mistake, which is cooking the oysters too long.
- The hinge: stop at the curlOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes in hot sauce. Beyond that they tighten into rubber and weep liquid that thins the cream.
- The creamed oysters have no quantitiesThe proportions for the cream, butter and cornstarch are not given in the text as it survives. For about a cup of shucked oysters, a scant cup of cream thickened with butter and cornstarch to a coating consistency is a reasonable reconstruction; note that a single teaspoon of cornstarch will give only a very thin sauce.
- Scalloped oysters, quantityThe number before 'cupful of oysters' has dropped out of the text; half a cup to a cup of shucked oysters suits a single deep saucer with the half cup of crumbs given.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book uses no oven terms here. A hot oven, around 425F, will brown the crumb top quickly; watch it, since the oysters overcook within a few minutes. A slower oven gives you pale crumbs and tough oysters.
- Rinsing and the liquorLift each oyster out of its water rather than pouring off, so grit stays behind in the bowl. Keep the liquor and strain it through a fine sieve or muslin; it carries most of the flavour of the finished dish.
- "Deep saucer"Read as an individual baking dish; the nearest modern equivalents are a small shallow ramekin or gratin dish of roughly 6 to 8 oz. Anything deeper stacks the oysters and they steam instead of baking.
- Cracker crumbsProbably plain soda or water crackers rather than seasoned crumbs, though the text does not say. The recipe gives only half a cupful of cracker and bread crumbs mixed, with no proportion between them; crush the crackers coarsely so the top browns rather than turning to paste.
- Buy oysters coldUse shucked oysters from a refrigerated case, keep them cold until they go into the pan, and use them the day you buy them. Discard any with a sour smell.
Individual portions of oysters, served creamed on toast or scalloped in a small dish, were a fixture of American invalid and convalescent cookery well into the twentieth century. Oysters were cheap, abundant along both coasts, and considered easily digested, which earned them a place in sickroom diets alongside beef tea and milk toast; scalloped oysters also became standard holiday fare in much of the eastern United States. The scaling down to a single deep saucer suggests these were written for a nurse or household attendant feeding one person at a time.