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Some Kitchen Kinks: Oysters
Broiled Oysters. Choose the largest oysters possible, pour a little water over them, and rinse in the liquor before lifting out; then drain in a napkin till dry. Dip into melted butter, then into cracker crumbs which have been seasoned with pepper and salt, and lay them between the wires of an oyster broiler. Move gently over a clear, hot fire until the juice begins to run out. Lay them on toast and serve hot.
Creamed Oysters.-- pint of oysters; 1 tablespoonful of butter; 1½ tablespoonfuls of cornstarch; pepper and salt; 1 cupful of thin cream.
Two oyster preparations, the first fully described, the second reduced to a list of ingredients with no method at all — a common shorthand in turn-of-the-century books, where the reader was assumed to know how a cream sauce goes together.
- The hinge: cook them barely at all"Until the juice begins to run out" is the whole instruction, and it is the right one. Shucked oysters need roughly two minutes a side under fierce heat; the moment the edges ruffle and liquid beads on the surface, they are done. A minute past that and they shrink to rubber.
- An oyster broilerA hinged double-wire basket with a long handle, held over coals so both sides cook without the oysters being turned individually. A folding fish or hamburger grill basket does the same job over charcoal, or lay the oysters on a rack set in a sheet pan under a preheated broiler at its highest setting.
- "A clear, hot fire"Coals burned down past flame and smoke to steady red heat — the nineteenth-century equivalent of a fully preheated broiler element. Flame would blacken the crumbs before the oysters warmed through.
- Rinsing in the liquorThe point is to wash off grit and shell fragments without losing flavour to plain water. Strain what liquor there is through a fine sieve or cloth and keep it, though after the rinsing water it will be dilute; the ingredient list for the creamed version does not call for it, but it can be used as part of the liquid.
- Drying mattersWet oysters will not hold butter or crumbs and will steam rather than brown. The napkin step is not fussiness — pat them genuinely dry before dipping.
- Cracker crumbsCrushed soda crackers or saltines, rolled fine, not the coarse dry breadcrumbs sold as such today. Panko is too open and will scatter through the wires; a food processor and a sleeve of saltines gets you there.
- A pint of oystersThe numeral is missing from the text here; a pint is the obvious reading. Shucked oysters were sold by volume then as now: roughly 16 to 24 medium oysters with their liquor, around 450 g including the liquor and rather less drained. Enough for two to four, depending on what else is served.
- Thin creamCream of roughly 18 to 20 percent butterfat, closest to what is now sold as light cream; half-and-half, at 10 to 12 percent, is thinner still. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent will thicken well past what the cornstarch is meant to do.
- The missing methodFor the creamed oysters the book gives you nothing but a shopping list. A plausible reconstruction: melt the butter, stir in the cornstarch, add the cream (the strained liquor can make up part of the liquid, though the list does not call for it), cook until it coats a spoon, season, then add the oysters and let them cook gently until they plump and curl.
Oysters were the cheap protein of nineteenth-century American cities, not the luxury they became. Chesapeake and New York beds were dredged on an industrial scale, barrels of shucked oysters travelled inland by rail packed in ice, and oyster cellars and saloons fed working people by the plateful — which is why a book of general household hints can toss off two oyster recipes as casually as it would potatoes. The purpose-built oyster broiler, a hinged wire basket sold specifically for the job, suggests how routine the dish was. The overfishing and pollution that collapsed the great Atlantic beds, and the price shift that followed, are the reason the same recipe reads as extravagant now.