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Oysters
PUT into the blazer twenty-five to fifty choice oysters. As soon as they are hot and look plump, add salt, pepper and butter. Serve on buttered toast or crackers. Add two tablespoonfuls of cream or half a tablespoonful of lemon juice before serving, if desired.
A chafing-dish recipe of the plainest kind: oysters heated in their own liquor, seasoned, and served on toast. Everything depends on stopping while they are still tender.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame; the water pan beneath it is for holding food warm. A wide skillet over medium heat does the same job.
- Timing is the hinge"Hot and look plump" means the edges have just ruffled and the flesh has firmed — roughly one to two minutes over direct heat. Past that the muscle contracts and toughens, and no amount of butter recovers it.
- How many oystersTwenty-five to fifty shucked oysters is a wide range, and the recipe gives no reason for it. Reckon six to eight oysters a person as a light course; twenty-five serves three or four.
- Their own liquorThe recipe adds no liquid, so presumably the oysters heat in the liquor they are packed in. Tip them in with a spoonful or two of it rather than draining them dry; if the pan looks likely to scorch, add a little more.
- Butter and saltNo quantities are given. Two to three tablespoons of butter for twenty-five oysters is right, added off the boil so it emulsifies with the liquor. Salt last — oyster liquor is already saline and varies a good deal by source.
- Cream or lemon, not bothThe two finishes are alternatives: 'two tablespoonfuls of cream or half a tablespoonful of lemon juice.' Cream gives a pale stew; lemon juice sharpens the liquor into something closer to a sauce. Acid added to hot cream can curdle it; in any case the original adds either one only before serving.
- The toastButtered toast underneath is structural, not decorative — it soaks up the liquor. Cut it thick and toast it dry enough to hold together.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American homes around the turn of the twentieth century, sold as equipment for informal late suppers, bachelor entertaining and the kind of small hospitality that did not require a cook or a set table. Oysters were the natural thing to cook in one: they were cheap and abundant on both coasts, they came already shucked from the fishmonger by the quart, and they need so little cooking that a spirit lamp is heat enough. Books of this period run to numerous chafing-dish oyster variations — panned, curried, in cream, à la Newburg — of which this is among the plainest. The casual scale of "twenty-five to fifty" says a good deal about how ordinary oysters then were; the same instruction reads as extravagance now.