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Pigs in Blankets
1 dozen large oysters 1 dozen thin slices bacon seasoning Pick over the oysters carefully, roll each in a slice of bacon and fasten the ends with a toothpick. Put in a hot chafing dish and cook until bacon is crisp. Season and serve very hot. Serves 3.
A two-ingredient chafing-dish dish that lives or dies on timing: the bacon has to crisp before the oysters overcook.
- The hingeOysters need only two to three minutes of heat before they tighten and turn rubbery. Use bacon sliced very thin so it renders in about the same time, and pull the pan the moment the fat is crisp at the edges.
- Par-cook the baconModern supermarket bacon is often thicker and wet-cured, so it may render more slowly than the thin slices this recipe calls for. Laying it in a dry pan for a minute or two per side first, until pliable but not crisp, closes the gap between bacon time and oyster time.
- Chafing dishThe original assumes a chafing dish heated over its own lamp. A heavy skillet on medium-high does the same work; a hot oven or broiler at 450F on a rack over a sheet pan is easier for a dozen at once.
- "Pick over the oysters"This means checking shucked oysters for bits of shell and grit, not washing them. Drain them well and blot dry, or the bacon will steam instead of crisping.
- SeasoningBacon brings the salt. Pepper, a little cayenne, and lemon at the table are the period-appropriate additions; hold back on any further salt until you taste.
- ToothpicksSoak wooden picks in water for ten minutes if you are broiling, and count them before serving so none reach a plate unnoticed.
- YieldTwelve oysters for three people is an appetizer or a savoury course, not a meal. Figure four per person and scale from there.
Pigs in blankets meant this before it meant a hot dog in pastry: an oyster wrapped in bacon, grilled or broiled, and served as a savoury or cocktail bite. The dish belongs to the long American vogue for oysters as an everyday food, when they were cheap enough to be sold by the barrel and turned up fried, scalloped, stewed and creamed in the same cookbooks. It suits the chafing dish, a fashionable apparatus for cooking at the table, where a hostess could produce something hot in front of guests without a servant or a trip to the kitchen. The same idea, with a chicken liver or a prune in place of the oyster, filled cocktail-hour menus for decades after.