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Beefsteak with Oyster Blanket
Wipe a sirloin steak, cut one and one-half inches thick, broil five minutes, and remove to platter. Spread with butter and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Clean one pint oysters, cover steak with same, sprinkle oysters with salt and pepper and dot over with butter. Place on grate in hot oven, and cook until oysters are plump.
A sirloin finished under a layer of oysters — essentially a broiled steak with an oyster topping baked just long enough to set. Two things decide whether it works: how far you take the steak in the first five minutes, and how briefly the oysters stay in the oven.
- Oysters cook in minutes"Until oysters are plump" means the edges have just ruffled and curled, which takes about 3 to 5 minutes in a hot oven. Past that they tighten and turn rubbery, and they weep liquor that floods the platter.
- A hot oven is 450°FA hot oven -- in cookbooks of this period a 'hot oven' is generally taken as somewhere in the 400-450°F range. Set a modern oven high and preheat fully; the point is to shock the oysters, not to keep cooking the beef.
- Broil five minutes means five minutes totalThe recipe gives a single broiling time, so about 2½ minutes a side. On a 1½-inch sirloin that leaves the interior very rare, and it will carry on cooking under the oysters. If you want it further along, add a minute per side and accept that the oven stage will push it further.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is roughly 15 to 20 medium oysters with their liquor — enough to cover a steak for three or four. Drain them well before laying them on, or the butter and juices will thin into a puddle.
- "Clean" the oystersChiefly picking each one over for shell fragments. Period books commonly direct a little cold water poured over them in a colander; rinsing instead in their own strained liquor keeps more of the flavour.
- Use an ovenproof platterThe recipe moves the steak straight from broiler to platter to oven. Use metal or heavy ceramic that will take a hot oven; a thin serving platter meant for the table may crack.
- "Place on grate" means the oven rackNo baking dish is implied — the platter goes directly on a rack, ideally the upper one so the oysters get top heat.
- Butter quantitiesNeither the spread nor the dotting is measured. Figure roughly 2 tablespoons softened butter over the steak and another 2 dotted across the oysters.
- YieldA sirloin cut 1½ inches thick runs 1½ to 2 lb and serves three to four with the oysters counted as the garnish and the sauce both.
Beef and oysters were a standard pairing in nineteenth-century American cooking, and not as a luxury: oysters were cheap and abundant along the Atlantic seaboard through most of the 1800s, sold shucked by the pint from carts and cellars in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They turn up as stuffing for a rolled steak, as the body of a sauce for beefsteak pie, and here simply piled on top. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 for the Boston Cooking School, catalogued the domestic repertoire of that seaboard kitchen with unusual precision about measurements, and the oyster recipes run to dozens, though nothing establishes this particular dish as hers. The dish is sometimes described as a relative of carpetbag steak, the oyster-stuffed steak associated with Australia and often said to have older British chophouse antecedents; the family resemblance is real, though the direction of borrowing is not documented. What changed after 1900 was the oyster supply — overharvesting and pollution of the northeastern beds sent prices up through the twentieth century, and a recipe that once used a pint as casually as a cup of stock now reads as extravagant.