Devilled Oysters
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-2 dozen oysters, cayenne, salt, 2 oz. of butter. AVERAGE CosT, 3s. 3d.
Open the oysters without spilling the liquor. Put under each oyster in the shell a very little salt, and a good seasoning of cayenne, and on the top of each a little piece of butter. Put them on a gridiron over a bright clear fire for about 4 or 5 minutes, and serve with thin brown breadand-butter.
TIME.-4 or 5 minutes.
SEASONABLE from September to May.
A two-ingredient devil: cayenne, salt and butter on oysters cooked in the deep half-shell. The whole thing turns on heat and timing.
- Do not overcookFour to five minutes over a fierce fire is right only for a very hot grill. The oysters are done the moment the edges ruffle and the liquor bubbles; past that they tighten into rubber.
- The gridironA gridiron sat directly over live coals. A domestic broiler at its highest setting, with the rack close to the element, is the nearest equivalent; a charcoal grill is closer still. Steady the shells on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil so the liquor does not tip out.
- Opening themKeep the deep (cupped) shell and its liquor -- that liquid is most of the seasoning. Work the knife in at the hinge rather than prising at the lip, which shatters shell into the meat.
- Quantities2 oz of butter across 24 oysters works out at only about half a level teaspoon each, which is enough; more and it floods the shell. Cayenne is the only heat here, so use enough to notice.
- Seasonable September to MayThe old rule against oysters in months without an R reflects both spawning season, when the meat goes soft and milky, and the risk of warm-water shellfish before refrigeration. Farmed oysters are now sold year round, though quality still peaks in cold months.
- Cost3s 3d is a pre-decimal Victorian price for two dozen; the figure on its own tells you nothing reliable about what that represented against contemporary wages.
- Yield and servingSix oysters a head, served hot in the shell as a savoury or first course, with thin brown bread and butter. Lemon is not in the original but is not out of place.
To "devil" a dish in British cookery from the late eighteenth century onward meant to season it aggressively with cayenne, mustard or pepper and then to grill or fry it -- devilled kidneys, devilled bones, devilled biscuits. It belonged particularly to the breakfast table, the supper tray and the club savoury, where a sharp mouthful was thought to rouse a jaded appetite. Oysters earn their place in a book like this because they were still, in Mrs Beeton's day and for some decades after, a comparatively everyday food in Britain rather than a luxury, though London prices were already rising by the 1860s as the beds were overfished: they were dredged in great quantities from the Thames estuary, Whitstable and the Essex coast, and sold by the barrel. The collapse of those fisheries through overfishing, pollution and disease in the early twentieth century is what turned a dish of two dozen grilled oysters from a modest supper into an extravagance.