Home › Ways Of Cooking Shellfish › Fancy Roast
Fancy Roast
Clean one pint oysters and drain from their liquor. Put in a stewpan and cook until oysters are plump and edges begin to curl. Shake pan to prevent oysters from adhering to pan, or stir with a fork. Season with salt, pepper, and two tablespoons butter, and pour over four small slices of toast. Garnish with toast points and parsley. 1 pint oysters Milk or cream 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour
A pan roast in the old sense: oysters cooked dry in their own moisture, not roasted in an oven. The whole dish takes about three minutes once the pan is hot.
- The hinge: stop at the curlOysters are done the moment the edges ruffle and the bellies firm slightly, roughly one to two minutes over medium heat. Held longer they shrink and turn to rubber, and no amount of butter will bring them back.
- The ingredient list does not match the methodMilk or cream and two tablespoons of flour appear in the list but are never used in the instructions. Made as written, the dish uses only oysters, butter, salt and pepper.
- A pint of oystersThat is a pint by volume of shucked oysters in their liquor, about 16 to 24 medium ones or roughly a pound. Shucked oysters are still sold by the pint or half-pint in tubs at good fish counters.
- "Clean" and "drain"Pick each oyster over with your fingers for bits of shell around the hinge, then drain well. Save the liquor; a spoonful stirred into the pan at the end makes the only sauce this dish has.
- StewpanA plain heavy saucepan or a skillet. Nothing goes in it first, so use a well-seasoned or nonstick surface and keep the pan moving, as the recipe says, until the oysters release their own liquid.
- Toast pointsToast cut corner to corner into triangles. The recipe puts the oysters over four slices and then calls for toast points as garnish, without saying how many extra slices to cut.
- YieldFour small servings as a first course, or two as a light supper. Serve immediately; oysters on toast go soggy within a minute or two.
A "fancy roast" is oyster-bar language rather than home-kitchen language: in nineteenth-century American oyster saloons a roast meant oysters cooked briefly in a pan or on a griddle in their own liquor and served on toast, as distinct from a stew, which was finished with milk or cream. The version here belongs to the late nineteenth-century cookbook tradition, when shucked oysters were cheap and turned up in these books in several barely different forms: stewed, creamed, scalloped, broiled, panned and roasted. The surviving descendant is the pan roast still served at oyster counters, most famously at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York, though that version keeps the cream this ingredient list omits.