Home › Fish & Oysters › Scalloped Oysters
Scalloped Oysters
1 pt. oysters. 1 cup cream sauce. 1 cup bread crumbs. Wash and drain oysters. Put in baking dish one layer of oysters. Spread with sauce. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and another layer of oysters and so on until all is used. Sprinkle the top with crumbs and bits of butter. Run in oven to cook and brown. Serve hot.
A short recipe that assumes you already know a cream sauce and the sight of a browned oyster casserole. The two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and how long is long enough.
- Oven and timingBake at 400F for about 20 minutes, until the crumbs are brown and the edges bubble. Longer than that and the oysters shrink and toughen; they only need to firm and curl.
- A pint of oystersThat is a liquid pint of shucked oysters in their liquor, the standard tub sold at a fish counter; the count varies with grade, in the region of two to three dozen for medium ones. Drain them but keep the liquor.
- Use the liquorOysters release a good deal of water in the dish, so make the cream sauce on the thick side and thin it, if needed, with a few spoons of strained oyster liquor -- bearing in mind that washing the oysters as directed will have diluted or lost much of it. Otherwise the finished scallop will be soupy.
- Cream sauceRead this as the usual roux-based sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or cream, salt and pepper. Season it firmly, since the recipe adds no other seasoning.
- Bread crumbsDry homemade crumbs from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind. Toss them with melted butter before layering and the top browns evenly rather than in patches.
- Keep the layers fewTwo layers of oysters with crumbs between and on top works well; with more layers the middle steams rather than browns. Note that this recipe begins with oysters rather than crumbs, so there is no bottom crumb layer, though other versions do start with one.
- YieldA pint of oysters in a shallow 8-inch dish serves four as a first course, three as a supper dish.
Scalloped oysters are a long-standing American company dish, traditionally said to be named for the scallop shells that early versions were baked and served in rather than for any connection to the scallop itself. Cheap and abundant East Coast oysters made the dish a fixture of nineteenth-century Thanksgiving and Christmas tables, particularly in the mid-Atlantic and New England, and it persists in that role in many families still. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers at a time when the Delaware and Chesapeake oyster trade was still large enough that a pint of shucked oysters was an ordinary purchase; she gives no guidance on buying them and spends her few lines on the layering instead.