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Chafing-dish Dainties
Oysters Sauté.
Wash and drain the oysters, season with salt and pepper, roll in fine crumbs, dip in beaten egg, then roll in crumbs again. Put a little olive oil or clarified butter in the blazer; when it is heated, put in the oysters, brown them on one side, turn, and brown on the other side.
Oyster Canapés.
Scald a cup of cream, add two tablespoonfuls of fine-grated bread crumbs, a tablespoonful of butter, a dash of paprica and a grating of nutmeg; then add two dozen oysters, washed, drained and chopped. Stir until the oysters are thoroughly heated, but without boiling the mixture. Spread rounds of toast with butter, and then with the oyster mixture. Serve at once accompanied by olives, pim-olas or gherkins.
Two chafing-dish oyster preparations from the era when the blazer pan was the fashionable way to cook at table. Both hinge on restraint: oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle.
- The blazerIn a chafing dish, the blazer is the upper pan that sits directly over the flame; the water pan beneath it is used for gentler work. Any wide, shallow skillet stands in for it, and a heavy 10-inch pan gives the sauté oysters room to brown rather than steam.
- Timing is the whole dishBreaded oysters need roughly a minute a side over a brisk heat, and the canapé mixture only long enough for the oysters to plump. Held longer, they shed liquor and turn rubbery and shrunken.
- Do not let the cream boilThe instruction to heat the oysters "without boiling the mixture" is the hinge of the second recipe. A boil both toughens the oysters and thins the sauce as they weep, leaving a watery spread that will not sit on toast.
- Buying oystersTwo dozen shucked oysters is about a pint, sold in tubs at most fish counters. Drain them well and reserve the liquor for another use; wet oysters will not hold breadcrumbs and will dilute the cream.
- Clarified butterCalled for because whole butter's milk solids scorch at frying heat. Clarified butter or a neutral oil lets you brown the crumbs properly; if you use the olive oil the recipe offers as an alternative, choose a mild one rather than a peppery extra-virgin.
- Paprica and pim-olasPaprica is paprika, sweet rather than hot in this context. Pim-olas were pimiento-stuffed green olives, sold under proprietary names as a relatively new commercial product in the early twentieth century, and now simply stuffed olives.
- Crumbs"Fine crumbs" here means dry, sieved breadcrumbs, closer to modern plain dry crumbs than to panko. In the canapé, two tablespoonfuls of grated crumbs act as the thickener in place of a roux.
- YieldThe canapé mixture, made with two dozen oysters, will spread enough rounds of toast for about four as a first course; the sauté recipe names no quantity of oysters, so scale it to the number you are serving. Assemble the canapés at the last minute or the toast softens.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American homes from the 1890s into the 1910s, promoted as equipment for informal late suppers, bachelor entertaining and the kind of cooking a hostess could do in front of guests without a servant. Oysters suited it perfectly: they were cheap and abundant on both American coasts, they arrived already shucked from the fishmonger, and they cook in the space of a conversation. Canapés — the word is French for a couch, the toast being the seat for whatever sits on it — were then a fairly new import into English-language cookbooks, and the pimiento-stuffed olives served alongside were themselves a recent commercial novelty. The two recipes together show the whole logic of the genre: one dish fried, one creamed, both finished at the table in a single pan.