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Celeried Oysters
Melt two tablespoons butter; add two cups each of celery and oysters. Season with salt, cayenne and lemon juice. Serve hot with crisp toast.
Four lines of instruction that assume you already know how a chafing dish behaves. The whole dish stands or falls on how briefly the oysters are in the pan.
- Oysters cook in two minutesAdd them last and pull the pan the moment the edges ruffle and the liquor turns opaque. Held longer they tighten into rubber and weep water that dilutes the butter.
- Cook the celery firstThe original lists both together, but celery diced small needs five to seven minutes in the butter to lose its raw edge and go translucent. Do that, then add the oysters.
- "Two cups oysters"That is a pint, which in a recipe of this kind almost certainly means shucked oysters with their liquor rather than oysters in the shell; a pint runs to roughly a dozen and a half to two dozen large oysters, and more if they are small. Drain them and reserve a spoonful or two of liquor to loosen the pan if it goes dry.
- Celery, dicedTwo cups is about four large ribs, cut in quarter-inch pieces. Strings on the outer ribs are more obvious in a dish this plain; peel them or use inner ribs.
- Cayenne and lemonNo quantities given. A scant eighth teaspoon cayenne and the juice of half a lemon suit a pint of oysters; add the lemon off the heat so it stays sharp.
- The chafing dishThe pan -- The recipe as printed names no vessel. If you are working in a chafing dish, use the blazer directly over the flame rather than the hot-water pan -- you want enough heat to sizzle the celery. On a modern stove, a wide skillet over medium heat does the same job.
- YieldServes three or four as a light supper or savory course, with toast cut thin and crisped hard so it does not go soggy under the butter.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate maker — which explains the book's heavy chocolate section but not its chafing-dish chapter. That chapter belongs to a broader fashion: from the 1890s into the 1910s the chafing dish was a fashionable American way to cook in front of guests, at the table, in a parlor or a college room, and cookbooks of the period commonly carried a section of quick spirit-lamp dishes built on oysters, lobster, cheese and eggs. Oysters suited the method, being cheap and widely shipped inland, and they suited a pan that did one thing well: cook something small very fast in butter. Celery was also sold as a table vegetable in its own right in these years, served raw in glass celery vases as part of a formal dinner, so a cook was likely to have it on hand.