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Oyster Sauce
1 tablespoonful butter 1 tablespoonful flour Salt and pepper 1 gill (1/2 cup) milk 1 gill (1/2 cup) stock 1 gill (1/2 cup) cream A few drops lemon juice Blend the butter and flour together in a fireproof dish, then add gradually the milk and stock and boil for five minutes, stirring all the time; add the lemon juice, cream, salt, pepper, and the oysters divided into two or four pieces, according to size.
Do not boil the sauce after the oysters are added.
A plain white sauce enriched with cream and finished with raw oysters, which cook in the residual heat. The only tricky part is restraint at the end.
- Do not boil after the oysters go inThe instruction is the whole recipe. Oysters toughen and shrink within a minute of boiling; off the heat, in a sauce at just below a simmer, they need only two or three minutes to firm and plump. Their edges will curl slightly when they are done.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the original helpfully notes: 4 fl oz or about 120 ml. Three gills gives about 1 1/2 cups (12 fl oz) of liquid before the cream is counted and the oysters go in.
- No oyster quantity is givenThe original never says how many. A pint of shucked oysters suits this volume of sauce; the count per pint varies a good deal with size. Use their liquor as part of the stock rather than throwing it away.
- "Fireproof dish"The recipe has you boil and stir in it, so it is meant to take direct heat: a flameproof earthenware or enamelled casserole. Any heavy saucepan does the same job; if you are using genuine earthenware, bring it up slowly to avoid cracking.
- The stockFish or light chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted. Oyster liquor is briny, so hold back on the salt until the oysters are in and the sauce has been tasted.
- Five minutes of boilingThat is longer than a modern cook would give a roux-thickened sauce, but it is deliberate: it cooks out the raw flour taste and reduces the sauce slightly before the cream loosens it again. Stir constantly, as directed, and keep the heat moderate.
- ServingThis is a sauce for poached or baked white fish, boiled fowl or steamed puddings of the savoury sort. It thickens as it stands and can be slackened with a little more milk over low heat.
Oyster sauce in the English and American sense has nothing to do with the fermented Cantonese condiment; it is simply a cream or béchamel sauce with oysters folded through, and it appears in British cookery books from the eighteenth century onward as the standard accompaniment to boiled cod, turbot and boiled fowl. It persisted into the early twentieth century, though by then oysters were no longer the cheap and abundant shore food and working person's food they had once been on both sides of the Atlantic, British beds having been badly depleted and prices having risen well before 1900.