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Scalloped Oysters
25 oysters 2 cups bread crumbs 1/4 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Grease dish and cover bottom with bread crumbs, then lay oysters in carefully; dust with salt and pepper and cover with bread crumbs; pour over milk and cover top with butter; bake in hot oven 15 to 20 minutes.
A plain two-layer scallop of the sort that filled American cookbooks around 1900. The whole thing hinges on heat and timing: the oysters should just firm up and curl at the edges.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F. At that heat the crumbs brown while the oysters cook through in the stated 15 to 20 minutes.
- Watch the oysters, not the clockShucked oysters are done when the edges ruffle, which can happen well before 15 minutes if they are small. Pull the dish when the crumb top is golden and the oysters are plump rather than shrunken and grey.
- Only two layersLayers -- Some period cookbooks warned against building a scallop with more than two layers of oysters, on the grounds that the middle tier would be underdone; how general that rule was is unclear. This recipe lays a single layer of oysters between crumbs.
- The crumbsThe recipe does not specify. Dry crumbs from stale bread brown better than soft fresh ones. Toss them with a little of the butter before layering if you want an evenly browned top.
- Oyster liquorOnly a quarter cup of milk is called for. If you like, strain in a spoonful or two of the liquor from the shucked oysters, but no more liquid than that or the crumbs go to paste.
- 25 oystersRoughly a pint of shucked oysters, or two standard 8-oz containers. Buy them refrigerated and use them the day you get them.
- ButterTwo tablespoons dotted over the surface in small pieces, not melted and poured, so the crumbs crisp rather than soak.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish, two as a supper. A shallow dish of about 1 to 1.5 quarts gives the right depth.
Scalloped oysters belong to a tradition of dishes cooked and served in a scallop shell, which is generally taken to be the source of the name: escalope and its English descendants appear to have described the vessel rather than the technique, and "to scallop" came to mean baking something in a shell or small dish with crumbs. Oysters were cheap and plentiful along the American East Coast through the nineteenth century, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, and versions of this dish appear in many general cookbooks of the era. The New Royal Cook Book was a promotional book issued by a baking powder company.