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Chafing-dish Dainties (Method Brown the butter)
Method. - Brown the butter and add to it the parsley, seasonings and flour; let heat, then add the well-drained oysters, and, when the edges begin to curl, add the well-beaten yolks. Serve on warmed plates, with fried bread and parsley.
This is the method half of a chafing-dish oyster recipe; the ingredient list that belonged above it is not on this page, so quantities have to be reasoned out. For a chafing dish serving four, roughly a pint of shucked oysters, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 egg yolks and a handful of chopped parsley is in scale with comparable recipes of the period.
- The hinge: the yolksBeaten yolks go in at the last moment and must not be allowed to boil, or the sauce curdles into scrambled egg in oyster liquor. Take the blazer off the flame, or swing it over the hot-water pan, before they go in and stir until the sauce just thickens.
- Oysters need one to two minutesThe recipe's own cue — the edges beginning to curl — is the right one and it arrives fast. Held longer over a flame the oysters tighten and turn rubbery, and they shed liquid that thins the sauce.
- Drain them properly"Well-drained" is doing real work here. Lift the oysters out of their liquor and blot them; otherwise the browned butter and flour cannot bind. Keep the liquor to loosen the sauce if it goes too stiff.
- Browning the butterCook the butter until the milk solids go nut-brown, not black — a matter of a minute or two over direct flame in a chafing dish, which heats unevenly. If the flecks blacken, wipe out and start again; scorched butter dominates the whole dish.
- Chafing-dish setupThe upper pan is the blazer, the lower one the hot-water bath. Brown the butter and cook the flour over the bare flame, then set the water pan underneath before the oysters and yolks go in.
- "Seasonings"In recipes of this kind that usually means salt and pepper, and possibly cayenne, a grating of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon; the page itself does not specify. Salt lightly at the start: oysters bring their own.
- Fried breadWhite bread fried in butter until crisp; small pieces of fried bread of this sort are called sippets in older books. Fry them before you start the oysters, since the dish will not wait.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities above (about a pint of oysters), this would serve roughly four as a first course or two as a light supper. Warmed plates are not a flourish: the sauce sets and dulls quickly on cold china.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American households around 1900, when it stood for informal after-theatre suppers, bachelor cooking and the sort of hostess entertaining that happened at the table rather than in the kitchen. Oysters were the natural material for it: still cheap and shipped inland in barrels and cans, they cooked in the minute or two that a spirit lamp could reliably manage, and they turn up repeatedly in chafing-dish chapters in browned butter, cream, curry or Worcestershire. "Dainties" in the section title is period usage for small choice dishes; it need not imply anything sweet. Browned butter and an egg-yolk liaison are both long-established techniques in French sauce-making, scaled down here to something one person could manage in front of guests with a single pan and no stove.