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Chafing-dish Dainties (Oysters la D'Uxelles)
Oysters à la D'Uxelles.
INGREDIENTS.
1 pint of parboiled and drained oysters.
1 pint of oyster liquor or chicken stock. 4 tablespoonfuls of butter. 4 tablespoonfuls of chopped mushrooms. 4 tablespoonfuls of flour.
A few drops of onion juice.
A few grains of cayenne.
1 teaspoonful of salt.
1 teaspoonful of lemon juice.
Yolks of 2 eggs.
Method. - Let the oysters be parboiled and drained beforehand. (To parboil, heat quickly to the boiling-point in their own liquor.) Melt the butter in the blazer, add the flour, salt and pepper, and cook till frothy; add the oyster liquor or chicken stock and cook until the boiling-point is reached. Now add the oysters, and, as soon as they are heated thoroughly, put the blazer into the bath and add the beaten yolks, the onion and lemon juice and the mushrooms. As soon as the eggs thicken the sauce a little, serve on toast or crackers. If uncooked mushrooms are used, cook them in the butter two or three minutes before the flour and seasonings are added.
A chafing-dish velouté built on oyster liquor, finished with yolks. Everything hinges on heat control at the end.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolksOnce the beaten yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will curdle into scrambled egg in broth. That is exactly why the blazer moves into the bath — the hot-water pan under it caps the temperature.
- Blazer and bathA chafing dish has two pans: the blazer sits directly over the flame, the bath is a water-filled pan set between them. On a range, use a saucepan for the first stage and switch to a bowl or pan over barely simmering water for the finish.
- Parboiling the oystersHeating them just to the boiling point in their own liquor takes under a minute — the edges ruffle and they plump. They then get reheated in the sauce, so anything longer at the first stage leaves them tough.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters are still sold by volume in some markets; a pint is perhaps two to three dozen depending on size, and weighs roughly a pound with its liquor. Save every drop of the liquor, strain it through a fine sieve for grit, and top it up with chicken stock if it falls short of a pint.
- SaltOyster liquor is already saline. Add the teaspoon of salt only after tasting the finished sauce, particularly if you are using a salted commercial stock.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp, or squeeze it in cheesecloth. A few drops means a few drops.
- The mushroomsA true duxelles is mushrooms chopped very fine and cooked down until dry, which concentrates the flavour and keeps water out of the sauce. Following the note at the end and sweating raw chopped mushrooms in the butter first gets you nearer that result than stirring them in cooked at the last minute.
- Consistency and yieldFour tablespoons each of butter and flour to a pint of liquid gives a moderately thick, spoonable sauce that should sit on toast rather than run off it. It will serve about four as a supper dish, or more as an appetiser on crackers.
Duxelles — finely chopped mushrooms cooked down in butter — is conventionally credited to François Pierre de La Varenne and named for his employer, the Marquis d'Uxelles, though the attribution is traditional rather than firmly documented. By the time this book appeared, in the closing years of the 1890s, "à la d'Uxelles" was often used loosely in American cookery for dishes carrying mushroom flavour, and it was attached here to the oyster, which was then the cheap, abundant shellfish of the Atlantic seaboard rather than a luxury. The chafing dish itself was a fashionable apparatus of the period: it let a hostess cook at the table without a servant in the room, and books like this one supplied a repertoire of quick sauced dishes on toast that could be finished in front of guests in a few minutes.