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Creamed Oysters and Celery
1 pint oysters 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour Milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1/2 saltspoon celery salt Squares of buttered toast 1/2 cup chopped celery Cook the oysters in their own liquor; skim; drain and reserve the liquor. Cook the flour in the butter; stir in gradually the oyster juice, to which milk has been added to make one and a half cups. Stir until the sauce thickens; reheat the oysters; season and serve on squares of buttered toast, sprinkling chopped celery over all.
A chafing-dish supper dish that comes together in under fifteen minutes, provided the oysters are treated gently. The whole thing hinges on not cooking them twice.
- Cook the oysters barely at allHeat them in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes, then lift them out at once. They are returned to the finished sauce to warm through; any further simmering turns them tough and shrunken.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So 1/8 teaspoon each of pepper and celery salt, which is less than it sounds given the celery salt is doing seasoning work alongside the plain salt.
- A pint of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, sold by volume — about 16 to 20 medium oysters, or a standard tub from a fish counter. Reserve every drop of the liquor; it is the backbone of the sauce.
- Making up the liquidA pint of oysters usually yields between 1/2 and 1 cup of liquor. Measure what you drain off and top it with milk to reach exactly 1 1/2 cups, which is the correct ratio against 2 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour for a sauce that coats without gluing.
- The rouxCook the flour in the butter two minutes over moderate heat without letting it colour, then add the liquid gradually off the boil to avoid lumps. Oyster liquor is salty and cloudy; taste before adding the full 1/2 teaspoon salt.
- Chafing dish or saucepanThe recipe specifies no equipment. In a modern pan on a gas or electric burner, keep it to medium-low or the sauce will scorch on the bottom while you stir.
- The celery is rawThe chopped celery goes on at the end, uncooked, for crunch and a green note against the cream. Chop it fine and do it just before serving so it does not weep.
- YieldServes four as a light supper or first course, two as a main. Toast the bread and butter it while the sauce thickens — it should not sit and go soft.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households from the 1890s through the 1920s, when a spirit lamp and a copper pan let a hostess cook at the table without servants, and cookbooks of the period often gave the form its own chapter. Oysters were the chafing dish's natural subject: they were cheap and abundant on both coasts before the Chesapeake and other beds were fished down, they needed almost no cooking, and they suited the late-evening supper the chafing dish existed to produce. Creamed oysters on toast belongs to a whole family of such dishes — oysters à la poulette, panned oysters, oyster pigs in blankets — that shared the same logic of a quick white sauce built on the shellfish's own liquor. The celery, both chopped and as celery salt, is of its moment; celery was a fashionable vegetable in nineteenth-century America, often served on its own in a cut-glass vase on the table.