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Fricassee of Oysters and Mushrooms
Melt two tablespoons butter; add one tablespoon flour, one half finely chopped onion, one cup mushrooms, broken in small pieces, one cup chicken stock or one cup oyster liquor. Cook five minutes and add two cups oysters drained from their liquor. Reheat; season with salt, pepper, cayenne and Worcestershire sauce. Serve with brown bread sandwiches.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the chafing dish stood in for a stove in parlors and dormitories. It comes together in under ten minutes, and the only real risk is overcooking the oysters.
- The hinge: oyster timing"Reheat" means exactly that — one to two minutes, until the edges just ruffle and the oysters plump. Held longer they shrink, toughen and weep liquid that thins the sauce.
- Chafing dish or saucepanThis reads like a chafing-dish dish, cooked over the gentle, indirect heat of a spirit lamp, though the recipe text itself does not say so. A heavy saucepan over medium-low does the same job; keep the heat modest so the flour does not scorch before the liquid goes in.
- Build the roux firstButter and flour want a minute or two of cooking together before liquid is added, otherwise the sauce tastes pasty. The onion and mushrooms can go in with the flour and give up their moisture as it cooks.
- Oyster liquorTwo cups of shucked oysters will yield roughly a cup of liquor. Strain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter — shell grit settles in it — and use it in place of stock for a much saltier, more oceanic sauce. Season with salt only at the end if you do.
- MushroomsA cup of mushrooms in 1907 may well have been canned or bottled, already cooked. Fresh cremini or white mushrooms need a few extra minutes to drive off their water; sauté them in the butter before adding the flour.
- Two cups of oystersThat is a pint of shucked oysters, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen depending on size, or two 8-oz tubs from the fish counter. Pre-shucked pints are the practical modern equivalent.
- SeasoningCayenne and Worcestershire are doing the work here; the book gives no quantities for them. Start with a pinch of cayenne and a teaspoon of Worcestershire and adjust off the heat.
- YieldServes three to four as a supper or light main course, six as a first course. Brown bread sandwiches means thin-sliced buttered Boston brown bread or a dark wheat loaf, cut small — the starch that makes the dish a meal.
Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907 under the name of the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, and its chafing-dish chapter belongs squarely to the chafing-dish craze that ran from the 1890s through the 1910s. The spirit-lamp chafing dish let hostesses, bachelors and college students cook at the table without a kitchen, and oysters were often said to be among its mainstays: cheap, abundant along the Atlantic coast, sold shucked by the pint, and cooked in a minute. Calling the dish a fricassee is a genteel borrowing — a fricassée is a braise of poultry — but nineteenth-century American cookbooks used the word loosely for anything simmered in its own sauce. The Worcestershire and cayenne are the standard late-Victorian chafing-dish accents, and the brown bread sandwiches mark this as a New England book: Boston brown bread with oysters is traditionally taken to be a regional pairing.