Oyster Sauce
25 oysters. 1 pint cream sauce Drain the oysters, saving the juice, and wash them. Strain the juice; bring it to a boil; skim and add the oysters. Cook until the edges of the oysters begin to curl and at the moment of serving add to the cream sauce. Add more seasoning if desired, but do not add it until the sauce is removed from the fire, as salt is apt to make the mixture curdle.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to make the cream sauce it sits on, and that leaves the quantity of oysters to your judgment. Two details matter: how briefly the oysters cook, and when the salt goes in.
- The oyster quantity is not givenThe original lists only the pint of cream sauce. A pint of shucked oysters (roughly 25 small to medium) to a pint of sauce is a workable proportion. Less makes a sauce that tastes of milk; much more turns it into a stew.
- Cream sauce in 1917Cream sauce -- A white sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. About 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk gives a medium sauce; half that gives a thin one. A cream sauce recipe was presumably given elsewhere in the book.
- Cook the oysters two minutes, not longer"Until the edges begin to curl" is the whole instruction and it is accurate — that is about 1 to 2 minutes in the simmering liquor. Anything past the curl and they tighten into rubber, and reheating the finished sauce will do the same thing.
- Do not skip straining the liquorOyster juice carries grit and shell fragments. Strain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter, then bring it to a boil and skim the grey scum that rises. That liquor is the flavour of the dish; discarding it leaves you with plain cream sauce.
- The salt warning is realThe original says plainly that salt is apt to make the mixture curdle, so season off the heat, at the last moment, and taste first -- the liquor is already salty and may need nothing but pepper.
- Assemble at the table, not beforeCombine at the last moment -- "At the moment of serving" is not decorative. Combine the drained hot oysters with the hot sauce and send it out; holding it on a burner overcooks the oysters and skins the sauce.
- Yield and useThe original gives no yield or serving count. Sauces of this kind were commonly served with boiled or baked fish and with boiled or roast fowl.
Oyster sauce in the American and British sense has nothing to do with the dark fermented Cantonese condiment of the same name; it is a white sauce carrying whole poached oysters, and through the nineteenth century it was a common accompaniment to boiled cod and to roast turkey. Its ubiquity was a matter of supply: East Coast oysters were cheap, shipped inland by barrel and by rail, and canned or shucked oysters were an everyday pantry item rather than a luxury well into the 1900s. The compressed style here reflects a book in which the cream sauce was given separately rather than repeated. The caution about salt curdling the mixture reflects a period when sauces were built on fresh unhomogenized milk and cream.