Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Oyster Dishes (Method Cook the onion)
Oyster Dishes (Method Cook the onion)
Method. - Cook the onion and butter in the blazer a few moments. Mix the flour and curry powder and stir into the butter. When frothy add the oyster liquor. As soon as the sauce boils up once, add the salt, pepper and cream, and, in a moment, the oysters. When the oysters are thoroughly heated, serve on buttered toast or crackers.
A chafing-dish curry that lives or dies by how long the oysters stay in the pan. Note that this page gives only the method; the ingredient list that accompanied it in the original is not reproduced here, so quantities have to be judged.
- The hinge: the oystersOysters need only to heat through — a minute or two, until the edges ruffle and they plump. Held longer they tighten into rubber and weep liquid that thins the sauce.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Any wide, shallow saucepan or skillet over low-to-moderate heat does the same job; the hot-water bath below was used for holding, and for gentler cooking than a dish like this needs.
- Bloom the curry powderMixing the curry with the flour and cooking it in the butter until frothy is deliberate — a minute in fat drives off the raw, dusty edge of the spice. Do not let it scorch, which happens fast in a thin chafing-dish pan.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid the oysters are packed in. Strain it through a fine sieve or a scrap of muslin first; there is nearly always grit and bits of shell. If you are short, a shucked pint yields roughly half a cup.
- CreamCream in this period was not standardised and was generally lighter than modern heavy cream. Light cream or half-and-half is the closer match; heavy cream will give a heavier, less savoury sauce. Once it goes in, keep the pan below a boil so it does not break.
- Working proportionsWorking proportions have to be reconstructed, since the ingredient list is not on this page: for a pint of oysters, roughly a tablespoon each of minced onion and butter, a scant tablespoon of flour and one to two teaspoons of curry powder is a workable guess. Salt lightly — oyster liquor is already salty.
- YieldA pint of oysters serves three or four on toast as a supper dish, or six as a first course on crackers. Toast the bread just before serving; it goes soggy within minutes under the sauce.
This appears to come from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties, published in Boston around the turn of the century, when the chafing dish was a fashionable centre of late-night and after-theatre entertaining in American middle-class homes. The appeal was social as much as culinary: the hostess cooked at the table, in front of guests, which meant the repertoire had to be quick, forgiving of a small pan, and built from things already cooked or needing barely any cooking at all — hence oysters, cream and a spoonful of flour. The curry powder is the period's Anglo-Indian inheritance, by then a commercial blend sold ready-mixed and used in American cookbooks less as Indian cookery than as a warm, faintly exotic seasoning for shellfish, eggs and chicken. Oysters themselves were still cheap and abundant on the East Coast in these years, which is why a book of this kind can devote page after page to them.