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Devilled Oysters
½ tablespoon finely chopped parsley ½ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Yolk 1 egg 1 teaspoon lemon juice Buttered cracker crumbs Clean, drain, and slightly chop oysters. Make a sauce of butter, flour, and milk; add egg yolk, seasonings, and oysters. Arrange buttered scallop shells in a dripping-pan, half fill with mixture, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake twelve to fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Deep oyster shells may be used in place of scallop shells. 2/3 tablespoons butter Crab meat, Indienne 2 tablespoon curry powder 1 cup chicken stock 1 cup crab meat
A baked oyster entrée in individual shells, bound with a thick white sauce enriched with egg yolk. The method is straightforward; the timing and the oven heat are what decide whether the oysters stay tender.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures, testing oven heat by hand or by flour; "hot" is usually taken today as somewhere around 425-450F. At that heat the crumbs brown in roughly the same time the filling sets, which is the point of the short bake.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersThe oysters go into the sauce raw and finish in the oven. Twelve to fifteen minutes is already the outer limit for shellfish this size; any longer and they tighten and weep liquid into the sauce.
- Sauce proportionsThe quantities for the oysters, butter, flour and milk are not stated in the text as printed here. A workable reconstruction is 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk (a standard white sauce; period "thick" versions use more of both), which should bind roughly a pint of shucked oysters.
- Adding the egg yolkTake the sauce off the heat before stirring in the yolk, or it will scramble in threads. The yolk is there for richness and body, not for thickening.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting or sheet pan. It simply holds the filled shells level and steady; nothing is baked directly in it.
- Shells and substitutesScallop shells and deep oyster shells were sold as kitchen equipment at the time. Small gratin dishes, ramekins or ovenproof shell dishes of about 1/2 cup capacity work in their place. The recipe specifies half-filling, which leaves room for the crumb layer.
- Buttered crumbsCracker crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a third of a cup of crumbs, until every crumb is coated. Unbuttered crumbs will not brown in so short a bake.
- Drain thoroughlyOyster liquor left clinging will thin the sauce as it bakes and loosen the crumb crust. Drain in a sieve and blot before chopping.
- YieldThe page gives no quantity or yield. On the assumed pint of oysters, expect roughly six to eight shells, enough for about four as a first course.
Devilled dishes ran through nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery as anything sharpened with mustard, cayenne or a pungent sauce, and cayenne is doing that work here. Oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by barrel and rail in Fannie Farmer's Boston, which is why they turn up throughout the book in soups, patties, fritters, stews and entrées like this one. The individual shell, filled and crumbed and browned, is generally associated with a period style of service in which each diner is often said to have received a small hot composed dish rather than a portion cut from a larger one, and scallop shells were sold as kitchen equipment for what is traditionally taken to be exactly this purpose.