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Chicken and Oysters
2 ounces butter 2 tablespoons flour 50 oysters Salt and pepper 2 hard-boiled eggs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Stew the chicken until tender; drain it and set in the oven to keep hot. To the liquor add the butter in which the flour has been rubbed, the chopped eggs, seasoning and parsley. Drain the oysters; add them to the gravy; cook until the edges curl. Pour the gravy over the chicken and serve.
A stewed fowl with an oyster gravy, written for a cook who already knew how to stew a chicken — the bird itself never makes it into the ingredient list. Everything hinges on the oysters going in last and staying in barely long enough to firm up.
- The missing chickenThe list gives butter, flour, oysters, eggs and parsley but no bird. A stewing or roasting chicken of about 4-5 lb, jointed and simmered in barely enough salted water to cover, is a plausible reconstruction; the recipe itself states neither quantity nor yield.
- Fifty oystersThat is roughly a quart to a quart and a half of shucked oysters, depending on size — a generous amount by current pricing, and easily halved without hurting the dish. Save every drop of their liquor.
- Oyster timing"Cook until the edges curl" is the whole instruction and it is accurate: one to two minutes in gravy at a bare simmer. Held longer they shrink, weep and turn rubbery, and the gravy goes watery as they give up their liquid.
- Butter and flour rubbed togetherThis is beurre manié — 2 oz (4 tbsp) butter worked to a paste with 2 tbsp flour, then whisked into the simmering broth in small lumps. It thickens without the raw-flour taste of a dry dredge.
- How much liquorThe recipe gives no liquid measure. Reducing the chicken broth before thickening — something in the region of 2 cups suits the butter and flour specified — keeps the gravy from being thin. Add the drained oyster liquor to that measure.
- Salt lastOysters and their liquor are salty and the volume here is large. Season the gravy after the oysters have gone in, not before.
- Keeping the chicken hot"Set in the oven" here means only holding the drained bird warm, most likely in the residual heat of a range rather than at any set temperature; a modern oven at its lowest setting, loosely covered, does the same job while the gravy is built.
- ServingOften sent to table over toast points, split biscuits or boiled rice, which absorb a gravy this loose.
Chicken and oysters together is an old Atlantic-seaboard habit rather than a single named dish: oysters were cheap and abundant in American cities through the nineteenth century, sold by the barrel and the bucket, and cooks used them the way a later generation used mushrooms — as a savory extender for poultry, in stuffings, sauces, pies and fricassees. Fifty oysters to one chicken looks extravagant now and looked ordinary then. The book assumes a reader with working knowledge, which is why the chicken can go unlisted and the stewing unexplained. The hard-boiled egg and chopped parsley finish is a standard Victorian and Edwardian dressing for a pale sauce, giving color to a dish that would otherwise arrive at the table entirely white.