Oyster Sauce
Scald one pint large fresh oysters, just enough to plump them; adding one tablespoonful pepper vinegar, a little black pepper and salt. Pour into a sufficient quantity of drawn butter and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A short sauce built on two nineteenth-century assumptions: that you keep drawn butter on hand and that oysters come with their liquor. Both need translating.
- Drawn butter is a sauce, not melted butterDrawn butter in nineteenth-century American cookery generally means a light flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour, then whisked with about a cup of hot water or oyster liquor — rather than plain melted butter, which is liable to separate once the oyster juices hit it.
- "Sufficient quantity""Sufficient quantity" is left to the cook; about a cup of drawn butter to a pint of oysters gives a sauce thick enough to spoon rather than pour. The oyster liquor can be used as part of the liquid in the drawn butter.
- Scald means seconds, not minutesBring the oysters and their liquor barely to a simmer and pull them the instant the edges ruffle and curl, 30 seconds to a minute. Held longer they shrink and turn to rubber, and no amount of butter recovers them.
- Pepper vinegarA Southern pantry staple: vinegar steeped with small hot peppers, still sold as such. A tablespoon of cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce is the nearest substitute, and the sauce wants that acid to cut the butter.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is roughly a dozen to two dozen oysters depending on size, or one standard tub from a fish counter, and should include the liquor.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of oysters with about a cup of drawn butter will serve several. Sauces of this kind were served with boiled or baked fish and with boiled fowl, and should go to the table hot rather than re-boiled.
Oyster sauce in this sense has nothing to do with the Cantonese condiment; it is the old English butter-sauce tradition, and in the Chesapeake it was made lavishly. Virginia and Maryland waters supplied enormous quantities through the nineteenth century, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, and cookbooks of the period treat a pint of oysters as an everyday staple. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered such recipes from named contributors elation stand in for a full name, as they do throughout the book. Pepper vinegar is the other signature here.