Home › Chafing-Dish Cookery › Roasted Oysters
Roasted Oysters
Purchase oysters in the shell and wash them carefully in running water, using a stiff brush. Place them in a pan with the deep half of the shell down; put in a hot oven and bake untill the shells open. Take the oysters out with a sharp knife and toss them into a chafing dish, with pepper, salt and butter. Cover closely; bring to a boil and serve.
A two-stage method: the oven does the shucking, the chafing dish does the seasoning. The whole thing takes less than fifteen minutes, and the only way to spoil it is to leave the oysters over the flame.
- The hinge: seconds, not minutes"Bring to a boil and serve" means exactly that — the moment the butter bubbles up around the oysters, they go onto the plate. Oysters held at a boil tighten and turn rubbery within a minute or two, and these have already been cooked once in the shell.
- "A hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F. The shells will gape open in something like ten to fifteen minutes depending on size; pull them as they open rather than waiting for the last stragglers.
- Discard the closed onesThe recipe does not say so. Any oyster that stays clamped shut after the rest have opened should be thrown out, as should any that smells sour or ammoniated when opened.
- Deep shell down, for a reasonSetting them cup-side down keeps the liquor in the shell instead of hissing onto the pan floor. Tip that liquor into the chafing dish with the oysters — it is the whole sauce.
- The chafing dishA chafing dish is a shallow pan (the blazer) over a spirit lamp, sometimes with a water jacket beneath. Work over the direct flame here, not the hot-water pan, which will not get hot enough to bring anything to a boil. A heavy skillet on a low burner does the same job.
- Butter and seasoningFigure a tablespoon of butter for every dozen oysters, and salt lightly — the liquor is already saline. A little lemon or cayenne is period-appropriate and welcome.
- ScrubbingThe stiff brush matters, since grit from the shell exterior ends up in the pan and then in the dish. Scrub under cold running water and keep the oysters chilled until they go into the oven.
- YieldSix to eight oysters per person as a first course, a dozen as a light supper. Serve on hot plates with toast or crackers; the dish cools very fast.
Chafing-dish cookery mattered in the first decades of the twentieth century because the chafing dish was a fashionable piece of equipment rather than a curiosity — a spirit lamp and a shallow pan let a hostess cook at the table, in a parlor or a dormitory room, without a kitchen or a servant. Oysters were a common chafing-dish material: cheap, abundant along the American Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and quick enough to suit a burner that produced modest heat. The oven-roasting step is often said to borrow from the older shore-side oyster roast, in which shellfish were heaped over a fire or on a hot iron sheet until they gaped, sidestepping the labor of shucking dozens of oysters by hand. Combining the two — roast to open, then finish in butter at the table — may be read as characteristic of the period's household manuals, which arguably liked to show how a rustic technique could be repackaged for a dining room.