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Scalloped Oysters in Tomato Sauce
1 pt. oysters. 1 scant cup tomato juice. 1/2 cup white sauce. Make white sauce. Add tomato and season to taste. Add a little minced green pepper. Put in baking dish in alternate layers of oysters and tomato sauce, adding a little cracker dust. Run in oven and bake twenty minutes.
A short set of directions that assumes you already know Mrs. Wilson's white sauce and her habit of leaving oven temperatures unstated. Both need filling in.
- The hinge: don't overbakeOysters shed liquor and turn rubbery fast. Twenty minutes is the outer limit, and the dish does best hot and shallow — a hot oven, around 400F, in a wide gratin dish rather than a deep casserole, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs color. The recipe states no temperature, so this is a modern reading. If the oysters are small, check at twelve minutes.
- White sauceA standard medium white sauce runs roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk. You need only half a cup here, so scale to 1 tablespoon each and 1/2 cup milk. Make it thick; the tomato juice and the oyster liquor will thin it considerably.
- Adding the tomatoAcid plus milk sauce curdles if handled carelessly. Warm the tomato juice and stir it into the finished hot white sauce off the heat, a little at a time — not the reverse. A scant cup of juice to half a cup of sauce gives a thin, pink sauce, which is what is wanted.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is about 16-24 depending on grade, roughly 3/4 lb of meat. Drain them and reserve the liquor; add a spoonful or two to the sauce for flavor and discard the rest, or the finished dish will be soupy.
- Cracker dustFinely crushed soda or oyster crackers, rolled to something between crumbs and powder. Saltines work. Use them between the layers as directed and a heavier scattering on top, dotted with butter, or the surface stays pale.
- Green pepperSweat the minced pepper in the butter before adding the flour. Raw pepper baked twenty minutes in sauce stays grassy and squeaky.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here means salt and pepper, with a pinch of paprika or celery salt if you like. Salt lightly — the oyster liquor and the crackers both carry salt.
- YieldServes two as a main course or four as a first course.
Scalloped oysters were a fixture of American cooking through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap urban food and East Coast cities had their oyster cellars and stands. The name is traditionally explained by the old practice of cooking and serving in the shell, and came to be applied to any dish layered with crumbs and baked, though the derivation is not settled. The tomato juice is worth noting: commercially canned and bottled tomato juice was not widely marketed to home cooks until the later 1920s, so a cook working from this recipe might equally have strained her own from canned tomatoes. Mary A. Wilson wrote on cookery for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.