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Creamed Oysters (Cups White Sauce II teaspoon)
1½ cups White Sauce II 1/8 teaspoon celery salt Clean, and cook oysters until plump and edges begin to curl; drain, and add to White Sauce seasoned with celery salt. Serve on toast, in timbale cases, patty shells, or volau-vents. One-fourth cup sliced mushrooms are often added to Creamed Oysters. 1 pint oysters 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour
A late-Victorian chafing-dish standard, reduced to almost nothing on the page because the book expects you to already know its white sauce. The ingredient list is printed out of order; read it as 1 pint oysters, 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup flour, 1 1/2 cups White Sauce II, 1/8 teaspoon celery salt.
- The hinge: barely cook the oysters"Until plump and edges begin to curl" is a matter of one to two minutes in their own liquor over moderate heat, no more. Held longer they shrink, toughen and weep water into the sauce.
- White Sauce IIThe page gives 1/4 cup each butter and flour beside the 1 1/2 cups of sauce, which points to a thick sauce rather than a thin one: cook the butter and flour together, then whisk in milk and simmer until smooth. It wants to be stiff, because the drained oysters will loosen it.
- Do not throw out the liquorThe recipe says drain, but the strained oyster liquor is the best seasoning in the dish. Reduce a few tablespoons of it and beat it into the sauce; hold back a little milk if you do.
- A pint of oystersRoughly two dozen shucked medium oysters, give or take with the grade, about a pound; sold today in tubs by the pint or half-pint. Fresh shucked, refrigerated, not the smoked or canned kind.
- Celery saltStill sold, and still mostly salt, so taste before adding any more. An eighth teaspoon in this quantity is a background note rather than a flavor.
- Timbale cases and vol-au-ventsTimbale cases were thin batter shells fried over a timbale iron; vol-au-vents and patty shells are puff pastry. Frozen puff pastry shells or good buttered toast both stand in without apology.
- The mushroomsSauté the quarter cup of sliced mushrooms in butter first and let their water evaporate. Added raw they will thin the sauce.
- YieldServes four as a light supper or first course, two if it is the whole meal. Assemble at the last minute; creamed oysters do not hold or reheat well.
Creamed oysters belong to the era when oysters were cheap urban food and the chafing dish was fashionable equipment. In Fannie Farmer's Boston of the 1890s, shucked oysters arrived by the pint from the Atlantic beds and turned up at church suppers, ladies' lunches and late evenings after the theatre, often bound in a flour-and-butter sauce and spooned into some kind of crisp container. The recipe's terseness is itself historical: The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was built on numbered, cross-referenced foundations, and a cook who had learned White Sauce II needed only a line or two to be told what to do with it next. Oyster populations in New England and the mid-Atlantic collapsed under harvesting and pollution in the twentieth century, which is why a dish that once read as thrifty now reads as a small luxury.