Home › O › Oysters, Scalloped (INGREDIENTS for dish)
Oysters, Scalloped (INGREDIENTS for dish)
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons. -3 dozen oysters, 1 oz. of butter, flour, 2 tablespoonfuls of white stock, 2 tablespoonfuls of cream; pepper and salt to taste; bread-crumbs, oiled butter. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Scald the oysters in their own liquor, take them out, beard them, and strain the liquor free from grit. Put 1 oz. of butter into a stewpan; when melted, dredge in SCALLOPED OYSTERS. sufficient flour to dry it up; add the stock, cream and strained liquor, and give one boil. Put in the oysters and seasoning; let them gradually heat through, but not boil. Have ready the scallop-shells buttered; lay in the oysters, and as much of the liquid as they will hold; cover them over with bread-crumbs, over which drop a little oiled butter. Brown them in the oven, or before the fire, and serve quickly, and very hot.
TIME.-Altogether, hour.
OYSTERS, STEWED.
A Victorian oyster gratin built on a small velouté rather than the cream-and-cracker casserole the name suggests in America. Two things decide whether it works: the oysters must never boil, and the sauce must be thick enough to cling in the shell.
- Do not let them boilOysters toughen the moment they pass a simmer. Scald them only until the edges ruffle — under a minute — and reheat them in the sauce over low heat, pulling the pan off before any bubble appears.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilly gill and the tough attaching muscle. On modern shucked oysters much of this is already trimmed; pinch off any gristly tab and leave the rest.
- Buying the oystersThree dozen shucked oysters comes to roughly a pint and a half to two pints with their liquor, depending on size; check tub volumes rather than counts. If you shuck your own, save every drop of liquor and strain it through muslin — grit is the usual fault in this dish.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. A light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark, salty or heavily reduced, since the oyster liquor brings its own salt.
- "Dredge in sufficient flour to dry it up"This is a white roux — a tablespoon or two of flour to the ounce of butter, enough to take up the fat. Cook it a minute without colour before the liquids go in.
- Oiled butterButter melted until it runs clear as oil. Some cooks pour it off the milky sediment, though the recipe does not specify that. It browns the crumbs without scorching.
- Scallop-shellsDeep scallop shells were standard tableware; 4 oz ramekins or small gratin dishes do the same job. Butter them, and do not overfill, as the sauce climbs as it heats.
- Browning"Before the fire" means under a broiler — three to five minutes, watched. In the oven, use a hot one, 425°F, for eight to ten minutes: long enough to colour the crumbs, short enough to leave the oysters alone.
- Time and yieldThe stated time is incomplete here: the fraction before 'hour' has dropped out, and half an hour altogether is the likely reading, most of it preparation. It serves four or five, as the ingredient list states.
Scalloped oysters are generally said to take their name from the shell they were served in — escallop, the fluted bivalve shell that Victorian kitchens kept by the dozen as individual baking dishes. The dish belongs to a period when oysters were still cheap enough to be everyday food in Britain: the great Kent and Essex beds supplied London in bulk, and oysters turned up in pies, sauces, stuffings and steak puddings as a matter of course rather than as a luxury. Beeton costs the dish at 3s. 6d. for four or five people; overfishing and later disease and pollution closed many beds by the end of the century, and the oyster's slide from working-class staple to delicacy is generally traced to those decades. The velouté base — butter, flour, white stock, cream — marks this out as the anglicised French cooking of the mid-Victorian middle-class table, distinct from the American scalloped oyster, which layers the shellfish with cracker crumbs and milk and bakes them together.