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Scalloped Oysters
2 tablespoons parsley 2 tablespoons celery teaspoon paprika 1 cup cream 1/4 cup wine Clean oysters. Butter a baking dish; arrange a layer of oysters in the bottom of the dish. Mix butter and bread crumbs; sprinkle oysters with crumbs, parsley, celery, paprika, salt and two tablespoons of cream. Continue arranging in layers until dish is filled, having crumbs for the last layer. Just before baking, add wine and bake twenty minutes. Oysters are best baked in a shallow dish so as to have two layers of oysters only.
A layered oyster scallop of the sort that appeared on every American holiday table around 1900. The original assumes you know the proportions of butter and crumbs by feel, and it gives no oven temperature, so a few numbers are worth fixing before you start.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated; the book was written for range ovens judged by hand. Twenty minutes implies a hot oven, so something in the region of 400-425F suits a shallow dish; bake until the top is brown and the cream bubbling at the edges.
- Two layers, no moreThe closing line is the hinge of the dish. Oysters buried three or four deep steam in their own liquor and turn grey and rubbery before the top browns. A wide, shallow dish holding two layers cooks everything in the same twenty minutes.
- CrumbsThis recipe calls for bread crumbs mixed with butter: use dry, coarse crumbs rubbed with melted butter rather than fine packaged crumbs, which pack down and go pasty. Reckon on roughly two cups of crumbs and a third of a cup of butter for a quart of oysters.
- Quantity of oystersThe ingredient list as printed does not state one. A quart of shucked oysters serves about six; choose a shallow dish just wide enough to take them in two layers.
- Cleaning the oysters"Clean" means picking through shucked oysters for shell fragments and draining them. Drain them well; their liquor plus the cream will otherwise flood the dish and leave the crumbs sodden.
- The wineThe recipe adds it just before baking rather than with the layers. A dry sherry or a dry white wine both suit.
- PaprikaThe printed measure reads only "teaspoon paprika", so a fraction may have dropped out. Half to one teaspoon of sweet paprika is in keeping with the rest of the seasoning, which is mild so as not to override the oysters.
- CeleryTwo tablespoons of finely minced celery, not celery seed or celery salt. It goes in raw with the parsley and softens as the dish bakes.
Scalloped oysters are generally said to take their name from the scallop shell, the original vessel for baking small quantities of fish or shellfish in crumbs, though the derivation is not settled; by the nineteenth century the name had in any case detached from the shell and attached to the method, any dish of something layered with buttered crumbs and baked. Oysters were still cheap and abundant in American cities when this book was compiled, shipped inland by rail in barrels and sold by the quart already shucked, which is why so many turn-of-the-century recipes begin with a casual quart of oysters and no note of expense. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of the era it ranged well beyond the product it was meant to sell, offering a full general cookery course with the confectionery chapters as the commercial payload.