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Creamed Oysters with Green Pepper
1 pt. small oysters. 1 pt. cream sauce. 1 green pepper, chopped fine after standing in scalding water 10 minutes. 1 tomato, cut fine and drained. 1/2 teaspoon grated onion. 1 stalk celery, cut very fine. Add oysters to hot sauce, also onion, tomato and pepper. Serve in one dozen toasted crustards garnished with parsley and served with cheese straws.
A creamed-oyster filling for toast cases, of the sort that filled the entrée slot between soup and roast. The whole dish stands or falls on how briefly the oysters sit in the sauce.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersSlide them into the already-hot sauce off direct heat and let them go just until the edges ruffle, two to three minutes. Held at a simmer they shrink, weep liquid into the sauce and turn to rubber.
- A pint of oystersSold shucked, that is 16 fl oz; the number of oysters in a pint varies a good deal with grade and size. If you drain them, the liquor can be stirred into the sauce for flavour rather than tipped in with the oysters, which would thin it.
- Cream sauceHere that means a white sauce of butter, flour and milk, or half milk and half cream, cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Make it slightly thicker than you want it, since the oysters and tomato will loosen it.
- "Crustards"Almost certainly the croustade: a bread case with the crumb hollowed out, brushed with butter and toasted crisp, or a small baked pastry shell. The recipe gives no yield, but a dozen cases would suggest about six servings at two apiece.
- Scalding the green pepperTen minutes in water just off the boil softens the pepper and takes the raw grassy edge off it. Modern bell peppers need only two or three minutes, or a brief sauté.
- Tomato and celeryDrain the chopped tomato properly, pressing it in a sieve, or the sauce goes watery. Note that the directions never say when to add the celery; putting it in at the end with the oysters keeps it crisp.
- SeasoningThe recipe names none; salt and white pepper are assumed to go into the cream sauce. Season the sauce fully before the oysters go in, and add a little cayenne if you want it to taste of its period.
- Assembly timingFill the cases at the table's edge, not in advance. Toasted bread holding a cream filling collapses within a few minutes.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson published her cookbook in Philadelphia in 1920, after several years of wartime food-conservation writing, and the book keeps the older American dinner structure in which a light "entrée" — creamed, scalloped or patty-shell dishes — arrived between the soup and the roast. Creamed oysters were the workhorse of that course throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: cheap shucked oysters, a white sauce, and a crisp vessel to carry them. What dates this particular version is the green pepper, along with the tomato and grated onion. Sweet peppers are generally said to have entered mainstream American recipe books around the 1900s and 1910s, and by 1920 a chopped green pepper was a fashionable way to give a pale cream dish colour and bite — the same impulse that produced pimento cheese and countless "Spanish" sauces of the era. The cheese straws served alongside offer something dry and salty to balance a soft, rich spoonful.