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Brown Fricassee of Oysters
2 tablespoons butter 2½ tablespoons flour 2 slices onion Sprig of parsley 1/2 cup oyster juice 1/4 cup cream 25 oysters Salt Buttered bread crumbs Scald the oysters in their own liquor and drain. Cook the flour in the butter; add the onion and brown; add parsley and oyster juice; cook until it thickens and add the cream. Add oysters and salt; pour into ramekins; cover with fine crumbs and brown in the oven.
A chafing-dish creamed oyster, finished under heat in individual dishes. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and nearly all the risk is in overcooking the oysters.
- Scald means seconds, not minutesScald briefly -- Heat the oysters in their liquor only until the edges curl, a minute or so, then lift them out at once. Held any longer they shrink and turn rubbery, and they get a second dose of heat in the oven.
- The oyster liquorTwenty-five shucked oysters will usually give up more than the half cup called for, though the amount varies with the oyster; strain what you pour off through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch shell grit, and save the rest for the roux if it looks thin.
- "Brown" fricasseeThe recipe directs the browning at the onion ("add the onion and brown"); the colour of the sauce is what separates this from plain creamed oysters, and cooking the flour in the butter a little before the onion goes in will help it along.
- Strain out the aromaticsThe onion slices and parsley sprig are there to flavour the sauce, not to be eaten. Fish them out before the oysters go in.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is already salty and its strength varies with the oyster. Taste after the cream has gone in and before you add any salt at all.
- Oven heatThe dish is fully cooked when it goes into the ramekins; the oven is only browning crumbs. The recipe gives no temperature: a hot oven, around 400-425F, for five to eight minutes will do it, or run them under the broiler for two or three, watching closely.
- Buttered crumbsFine dry crumbs tossed with melted butter, about a tablespoon of butter to a half cup of crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs will scorch in patches rather than browning evenly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; twenty-five oysters should fill about four small ramekins as a first course, or two as a light supper dish with toast.
The brown fricassee belongs to an older French vocabulary in which a fricassee was meat or fish cooked in a sauce made in the same pan, and the cook chose between a fricassee blanche, thickened with a pale roux and cream, and a fricassee brune, built on a browned one. By the time this recipe was printed the word had drifted in American usage toward stewed chicken, but the older sense survives here in the instruction to cook the flour and colour the onion. Between roughly the 1890s and the First World War the chafing dish was the fashionable apparatus of the American middle-class household, used for late suppers and after-theatre entertaining, and oysters, then cheap and sold shucked by the quart in most cities, were its standard material. This dish, though, finishes in ramekins under crumbs, in the oven.