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Scalloped Oysters
Butter a baking dish and fill it with alternate layers of oysters and bread crumbs, making the bottom layer oysters and the top layer crumbs. Season each layer of crumbs thoroughly and dot with small pieces of butter. When the dish is full moisten with equal parts of oyster juice and milk. 1 pint oysters 3/4 cup milk
A complete dish in two sentences, with the oven left entirely to the cook's judgment. The points below fill in what Mrs. Fryer assumed her readers already knew.
- The hinge: keep the layers shallowThe recipe says only to alternate layers until the dish is full, but a shallow dish suits it best. Piled deep, the middle heats slowly while the top browns, and the oysters can overcook before the centre is hot.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, as few home ranges of the period had a working oven thermometer and heat was judged by eye. A modern equivalent is about 400F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top is browned and the liquid bubbles at the edges. The oysters are done as soon as their edges ruffle.
- Crumbs, not packaged breadcrumbsPeriod crumbs meant stale bread torn or grated coarse, closer to a soft crumb than to fine dry meal. Fine commercial crumbs pack down and turn pasty; tear day-old bread and dry it briefly in the oven instead. Cracker crumbs were the common alternative and behave similarly.
- Oyster juice means the liquorThe liquid in the container with the shucked oysters. Since the recipe calls for equal parts liquor and milk, you need about 3/4 cup to match the 3/4 cup of milk; a pint of oysters may or may not yield that much, so make up any shortfall with milk. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve to catch shell grit.
- Season each layerSalt, pepper, and often a little mace or cayenne in this period. Because the oysters and their liquor are already salty, salt the crumbs lightly and taste the liquid before adding more.
- Butter quantityUnstated. Roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons total, dotted over the crumb layers, suits a pint of oysters; the top layer wants the most, since that is what browns.
- Yield and dishA pint of oysters roughly fills a 1-quart baking dish and serves three or four as a supper dish, six as a side.
Scalloped oysters belong to the era when oysters were cheap, abundant, and shipped inland by the barrel and later by rail, which is why an early twentieth-century American cookbook treats them as an everyday item rather than a luxury. The name comes from the older culinary sense of "scallop" or "escallop" -- to bake in a shell or shallow dish with crumbs -- a usage tied to the shape of the shell rather than to the shellfish as an ingredient; early versions were often baked in oyster or scallop shells. The dish is frequently associated with New England, though its origin is not firmly documented, and its persistence at Thanksgiving and Christmas in much of the United States is often said to be a holdover from the days when the holiday oyster shipment was the season's event.