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Oyster Rarebit
Clean and remove the hard muscles from half a pint of oysters; parboil the oysters in the chafingdish in their own liquor until their edges curl, then remove to a hot bowl. Put one tablespoonful of butter, half a pound of cheese broken in small bits, one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of salt and mustard and a few grains of cayenne into the chafing-dish. While the cheese is melting, beat two eggs slightly, and add to them the oyster liquor; mix this gradually with the melted cheese, add the oysters, and turn at once over hot toast.
A chafing-dish rarebit is really a stirred custard held together by melted cheese, and it fails in exactly one way: too much heat. Everything below follows from that.
- The hinge: keep the heat gentleOnce the beaten eggs go in, the mixture must stay below a simmer or it curdles into grainy curds in seconds. If your chafing dish has a water pan, use it for this stage; on a stovetop, work over low heat and pull the pan off entirely while stirring the egg mixture in.
- Half a pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. Half a pint is one cup, roughly 8 fluid oz, or somewhere around eight to a dozen medium shucked oysters depending on size. Reserve every drop of the liquor; it is the only added liquid in the dish.
- "Hard muscles"The tough adductor muscle, the small pale knob on the side. Pinch off anything firm you find.
- Parboiling means about two minutesOysters are done the moment the edges ruffle — a minute or two in their own liquor. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber, which is why the recipe has you lift them out into a bowl and return them only at the end.
- Half a pound of cheese8 oz, and the period default would be a firm aged cheddar or a dry "American" factory cheese. Grate rather than break it up; pre-shredded cheese is coated with anti-caking starch and melts stringily. A little cornstarch tossed with the grated cheese is not in the original but does stabilise it.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared; a quarter teaspoon of any English-style mustard powder.
- ToastCut thick and toast it dry and hard. Rarebit soaks in immediately, and soft bread collapses under it.
- YieldProbably three as a supper dish, four as a savoury course; the recipe gives no yield. It does not reheat -- make it to order.
The chafing dish had a real vogue in American households around 1900, and books like this one treated it as equipment for a particular social occasion: the late supper after the theatre or the card party, cooked at the table by the hostess herself, with no servant and no kitchen involved. Welsh rarebit was the anchor of that repertoire — a melted-cheese dish generally traced to eighteenth-century Britain, where the name is usually explained as a joke about cheese standing in for game on a poor man's table. Adding oysters was a characteristically American move: oysters were still cheap and abundant on the Eastern seaboard in this period, sold shucked by the pint from barrels and carts, and they turn up folded into everything from stuffings to stews to, as here, a cheese rarebit. The combination reads richly today mostly because oysters no longer cost what they did.