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Curried Oysters, No. 2
1 quart of oysters. ¼ a cup of butter.
INGREDIENTS.
One small mild onion.
1 tablespoonful of curry powder. ¼ a cup of flour.
1 cup of oyster liquor.
1 cup of white stock. 1/2 a cup of thick tomato pulp.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Method. - Bring the oysters to the boiling-point in their own liquor, skim, drain, and set aside.
Heat the butter in the blazer, sauté in it the onion cut in slices, stir in the flour and curry powder mixed with the salt and pepper, and, when frothy, add the oyster liquor, stock and tomato pulp (a pint of pulp reduced by slow cooking to half a cup). When the sauce boils, add the oysters; and when hot serve on buttered toast or fried bread.
A chafing-dish curry from the era when the blazer pan was the smart way to cook at table. The whole dish hinges on not overcooking the oysters, which are already done before the sauce is built.
- The oystersBringing them just to the boiling point in their own liquor is enough — they plump and their edges ruffle in under two minutes. Once the finished sauce boils, return them only long enough to heat through, perhaps 30 seconds, or they will tighten into rubber.
- QuantitiesThe fractions read as 1 quart of oysters, 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup flour, 1 tablespoon curry powder, 1 cup oyster liquor, 1 cup white stock and 1/2 cup thick tomato pulp. A quart of shucked oysters is roughly 2 lb, or two 16-oz tubs.
- BlazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, sitting directly over the flame. Any wide 10-inch sauté pan does the same work; use the hot-water pan underneath only if you want to hold the dish at table without further cooking.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted. A light, unsalted chicken stock is the close modern equivalent — avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the curry.
- Tomato pulpThe parenthesis is the instruction: a pint of pulp cooked slowly down to half a cup. Tomato paste loosened with a little stock will approximate that concentration, but you need enough of it to make up the half-cup the recipe calls for.
- Curry powderPeriod curry powder was generally mild and turmeric-forward. Frying it in the butter with the flour, as directed here, is what wakes it up; cook until the raw, dusty smell gives way to something toasty before the liquids go in.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through a fine sieve or cloth after the initial heating — shell grit always settles out. If a quart of oysters yields less than a cup, make up the difference with stock rather than water.
- YieldServes four to six over toast as a supper dish, or eight as a first course. Cut and butter the toast before you start; the sauce waits badly.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American cities around 1900, when a spirit lamp and a silver-plated blazer let a hostess cook in the parlour without troubling the kitchen — the fashion produced whole books of "dainties" like this one, heavy on oysters, eggs, cheese and creamed shellfish because those cook in minutes over a small flame. Curried oysters sit at the meeting point of two period habits: the Anglo-Indian curry powder that had become a standard grocery item in Britain and the United States, and the cheapness of oysters, which were widely eaten, though by 1900 the beds were in decline and prices were rising. The instruction to reduce a pint of tomato pulp to half a cup reflects a kitchen in which concentrated tomato, though it existed in tins and tubes, was not yet a routine American grocery item.