Creamed Oysters
To each 30 oysters use 1 cup thin cream sauce. Drain oysters, saving liquor for soup, put into shallow pan over quick fire and boil about one minute or until edges curl, stirring constantly, and add to cream sauce. Or put on the oysters with 1 table spoon butter; when cooked add 1 tablespoon flour which has been mixed with a little cold water; add 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Worcestershire sauce may be added if desired. Boil 1 minute and serve on thin squares of toasted bread; garnish with parsley. Three stuffed olives cut into rings and put around the edge make this a very attractive dish.
A quick chafing-dish supper that depends almost entirely on not overcooking the oysters. The recipe gives two routes to the same plate: fold cooked oysters into a ready-made cream sauce, or build the sauce around them in the pan.
- The hinge: one minute, no moreOysters are done the moment the edges ruffle and the flesh firms slightly, which at a shucked-oyster's size is well under two minutes. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery, and they will keep cooking in hot sauce, so pull them early.
- How many oysters is 30Thirty shucked oysters is roughly a quart with liquor, or about 1 to 1.25 lb of drained meats depending on size. Standards or selects from a tub work; very large ones should be halved so they cook evenly.
- "Thin cream sauce"In this period a thin white sauce is about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk or cream, against 2 tablespoons each for a medium one and more again for a thick. The second method in the text uses 1 tablespoon each to 1/2 cup milk, thicker than that on paper, though the oysters give up liquor into the pan.
- Quick fireMedium-high heat on a modern burner. The pan should be hot enough that the oysters release and firm rather than stew in their own liquor, which is why the recipe says shallow pan and constant stirring.
- Save the liquor, and consider using someThe liquor is directed to soup, but a few tablespoons strained and stirred into the sauce restores the flavour lost in draining. Add it before the milk and let the sauce come back to a simmer.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon may be plenty. Taste after the liquor goes in; oysters carry their own salinity and the Worcestershire adds more.
- YieldThirty oysters with a cup of sauce serves four as a light main course over toast, or six as a first course. Toast the bread just before serving so it does not soften under the sauce.
- The olive garnishPimiento-stuffed olives sliced into rings are still sold everywhere and do the same job now as then, which is to put red and green against a white sauce. Parsley alone is fine if the plate already has colour.
Creamed oysters belong to the great American oyster boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dredged Atlantic and Gulf oysters were cheap, shipped inland packed in ice, and sold shucked by the quart. That abundance is why an oyster dish sits comfortably in a general household cookbook rather than a luxury one, and why the recipe casually starts at thirty oysters. The dish itself is a white-sauce preparation of the kind that dominated turn-of-the-century American cooking, taught in the cooking schools of the period as a ratio to be memorised and applied to whatever was at hand. It is served on squares of toast, with a garnish arranged around the rim.