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Oyster Sauce
1 pint white sauce. 1 pint small oysters, washed, drained, cooked 10 minutes, chopped and added to sauce. 1/2 spoon grated onion. 1 teaspoon chopped celery.
A shorthand entry that assumes you already know how to make a white sauce and how much a "spoon" is. Two things need fixing before it works on a modern stove.
- The hinge: cut the oyster timeTen minutes turns small oysters into erasers. Poach them in their own liquor just until the edges curl and they plump, roughly 1 to 2 minutes, then lift them out, chop, and fold them into the finished sauce off the heat.
- What the white sauce isA white sauce here is a roux of butter and flour cooked together with milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon; a medium sauce runs about 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk, so about 4 of each for the pint called for. Season with salt and white pepper; the oysters bring their own salinity, so season at the end.
- "1/2 spoon" is ambiguousThe recipe writes "teaspoon" for the celery but only "spoon" for the onion, so the intended measure is unclear. Half a teaspoon of grated onion is a whisper; half a tablespoon is closer to what the sauce wants. Start with the smaller amount and taste.
- Save the liquorThe oyster liquor left after washing and draining is the best flavour in the dish. Strain it through a fine sieve to catch grit and use a few tablespoons in place of an equal amount of the milk.
- Onion and celery want a moment of cookingGrated raw onion tastes sharp in a milk sauce. Sweat the onion and the chopped celery in the butter for a minute before adding the flour, and the finished sauce will taste rounder.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters are still sold by the pint in many fish markets; a pint weighs roughly a pound, and the count varies with grade, with smaller oysters running more to the pint. Drained and chopped, they will give you about a cup and a half of meat.
- Yield and what it goes withAbout 3 cups, enough for 6 to 8 servings. This is the sauce for boiled or roast poultry and for boiled fish; it also serves over toast as a light supper dish.
Oyster sauce in the English and American sense has nothing to do with the Cantonese condiment of the same name; it is a plain milk or cream sauce carrying poached oysters, and it was a common partner to boiled fowl and boiled cod on nineteenth-century tables. Oysters were sold shucked by the pint from barrels, and cooks used them the way they used mushrooms, to give body and savour to something otherwise bland. Mrs. Wilson wrote a great deal on wartime and post-war food economy, and the compressed, almost telegraphic style here, where a recipe is a list of proportions and the reader is trusted to know the method, is common in her published recipes.