Home › Fish Recipes › Oyster Curry
Oyster Curry
1/2 pint (I cup) tomatoes 3 tablespoonfuls curry powder 1/2 pint (I cup) beef stock I apple 2 tablespoonfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful plain boiled rice 2 tablespoonfuls butter I Spanish onion Chop the onion and brown it in one tablespoonful of the butter in a casserole or earthenware dish, add the curry powder, the remaining tablespoonful of butter, the apple chopped, and the stock.
Simmer slowly for half an hour.
Put the oysters, their liquor, and the tomatoes into another pan over the fire. When the edges of the oysters begin to ruffle put the two mixtures together. Add the salt, and thicken with the flour moistened with a little cold water. Boil for five minutes stirring constantly.
Serve with the hot plain boiled rice. 18 scallops
A straightforward Edwardian curry sauce built on onion, apple and stock, with the oysters cooked separately and folded in at the last minute. The ingredient list as printed has one gap and one puzzle worth sorting out before you start.
- The missing oystersThe ingredient list never states an oyster quantity, and the trailing line "18 scallops" is almost certainly a stray fragment or typesetting slip. For a cup of tomatoes and a cup of stock, a pint of shucked oysters with their liquor is the sensible reading.
- Do not overcook the oystersThis is the hinge. "When the edges begin to ruffle" means roughly one to two minutes in the hot tomato — that is the finish line, not a checkpoint. The subsequent five-minute boil to cook out the flour will toughen them, so consider thickening the curry base first and adding the oysters only at the end.
- Half a pintThe book helpfully glosses it: a half pint here is one US cup, 8 fl oz. The same applies to the stock.
- Casserole means the potIn this period a "casserole" was a lidded earthenware or flameproof clay vessel used directly over the fire, not a baked dish. A heavy enamelled cast-iron pot or a modern flameproof stoneware pot does the same job; ordinary earthenware will crack on a gas burner.
- Spanish onionA large, mild, pale onion, often somewhere around 8 to 12 oz. A single yellow onion of similar weight substitutes without complaint.
- Three tablespoons of curry powderPeriod curry powders tended to be milder and more turmeric-forward than many blends sold now. With a hot modern blend, start with two tablespoons and taste. Frying it in the butter with the onion, as directed, is correct and drives off the raw dustiness.
- The appleA tart cooking apple, peeled and chopped, dissolves into the sauce during the half-hour simmer and supplies the sweet-sour edge the recipe otherwise lacks. Bramley, Granny Smith or similar.
- YieldWith a pint of oysters and a cup of rice this feeds three or four as a main course. Boil more rice than the recipe suggests if you want it to stretch to four.
Curried oysters belong to a long Anglo-American habit of treating curry powder as a sauce flavouring rather than a cuisine — the commercial blends sold by British grocers from the late eighteenth century onward were designed exactly for this, to be stirred into a butter-and-flour base with stock and an apple for sweetness. Oysters were still comparatively plentiful and cheap on both sides of the Atlantic when this book appeared, sold from barrels, and cookery writers were constantly looking for new ways to use them beyond stews and scallops. The book itself belongs to a small genre of casserole manuals that appeared in the years before the First World War, when glazed earthenware and the newly fashionable French casserole were being marketed to American households as an economical way to cook cheaper cuts and one-pot dishes. The separate-pan technique here — sauce in the casserole, oysters elsewhere, combined at the end — suggests the author was alert to what a long simmer does to shellfish.