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Oyster Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1½ cups oyster liquor 1 cup oysters + teaspoon salt few grains cayenne Parboil oysters; drain and reserve liquor. Make a White Sauce, with butter, flour, seasonings, and oyster liquor; add chopped oysters and serve. Should there not be sufficient oyster liquor make up amount with milk.
A thick velvet sauce built on oyster liquor rather than milk, meant to be spooned over boiled fish or poached fowl. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the oysters are shucked.
- Do not overcook the oystersParboiling here means dropping the shucked oysters into their own liquor over heat only until the edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes, then lifting them out. Left in longer they tighten into rubber, and they get a second brief heating when returned to the finished sauce.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid in the shells plus whatever drains off. A pint of shucked oysters may well yield under a cup, so expect to top up with milk as the recipe allows. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth; shell grit is the usual fault in this sauce.
- The salt quantity is garbledThe original line reads "+ teaspoon salt," a printer's or scanner's corruption of a fraction. Given that oyster liquor is already saline, start with a scant quarter teaspoon and correct at the end.
- A thick sauce by designFour tablespoons flour to two of butter is a lean, stiff roux by modern standards; the flour will not be fully coated in fat. Cook it a full two minutes over low heat before adding liquid, and whisk the liquor in gradually or it will lump. For a pouring sauce rather than a coating one, three tablespoons flour is closer to current practice.
- Cayenne"Few grains" means a pinch off the knife tip, no more than an eighth teaspoon. It is there for warmth behind the brine, not heat you can identify.
- Yield and servingAround two and a half cups once the oysters go in, enough for about six servings. It suits boiled cod, halibut or salmon, and poached or boiled chicken and turkey; it was also served with roast turkey in place of gravy.
- Holding itThe sauce skins over quickly. Keep it covered off the heat, or press a round of buttered paper onto the surface, and stir in a spoonful of milk to loosen it before it goes to table.
Oyster sauce in the American and English sense has nothing to do with the fermented Cantonese condiment of the same name; it is simply a white sauce enriched with oysters and their liquor, and it appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks as the standard accompaniment to boiled fish and boiled fowl. Its presence in a 1907 chocolate company's cook book is a reminder of how cheap oysters then were: the beds of the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound supplied city markets in enormous volume, oysters were sold by the quart from barrels and carts, and a cup of them in a sauce was an everyday economy rather than a luxury. The overfishing and pollution of those beds through the twentieth century inverted the arithmetic entirely, which is why a sauce built on a full cup of chopped oysters now reads as extravagant.<br><br>Maria Willett Howard, who compiled Lowney's Cook Book for the Walter M. Lowney Company, wrote it as a general household manual with the chocolate chapters attached, so the sauce section covers the plain repertoire a cook of the period was expected to have at hand.</p>