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Flour (Cup buttered crumbs cup butter)
3/4 cup macaroni broken in. 1 inch pieces. 1/2 cup buttered crumbs 1/4 cup butter Cook macaroni in boiling salted water until soft; drain, and rinse with cold water. Put a layer in bottom of a buttered pudding-dish, cover with oysters, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and dot over with one-half of the butter; repeat, and cover with buttered crumbs. Bake twenty minutes in hot oven. 1 pint oysters
The ingredient list has been mangled by the typesetting of the original page — the macaroni quantity is missing entirely, and the oysters appear at the end. A half-pound (about 2 cups dry) of elbow or short-cut macaroni is the right proportion for a pint of oysters.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally rendered as somewhere around 425-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat thickens the liquor the oysters throw and browns the crumb top; a cooler oven leaves the dish soupy.
- Buttered crumbsHalf a cup of dry crumbs tossed with about a tablespoon of melted butter until they are coated but still loose. The quarter cup of butter in the list is for dotting the layers, not for the crumbs.
- The hinge: do not pre-cook the oystersThey cook only in the twenty minutes of baking, which is the whole reason the layering works. Oysters that have been simmered or heated first will be rubber by the time the top browns.
- Rinsing the macaroniThe cold rinse stops the cooking and washes off surface starch, which should help the layers stay distinct rather than gluing into a paste. The recipe itself says to cook the macaroni until soft.
- Dredging with flourA light sprinkle over each oyster layer, perhaps a tablespoon in total. It is the only thickener in the dish and binds the liquor the oysters release; too much makes a pasty layer.
- Pudding-dishAny 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish. Butter it well; the milk solids and oyster liquor will catch.
- OystersA pint of shucked oysters is roughly 20-30, depending on size. Drain them but keep a little liquor; check for shell fragments before layering.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; probably four as a main course, six as a side. Best eaten straight from the dish -- it stiffens as it cools.
Scalloped oysters in one form or another run through a great many nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and this is the macaroni version: oysters were cheap and abundant along the Atlantic seaboard well into the early 1900s, and stretching them with a starch was ordinary household economy rather than a delicacy. If this page is from Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, as the wording and form suggest, such dishes sit among its shell-fish chapters, written for a cook who could buy oysters by the pail -- a domestic reality that faded over the twentieth century as the beds of the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound were overfished, diseased and polluted. Macaroni in New England kitchens of the period was generally treated as a plain boiled starch to be layered and baked with butter and crumbs, rather than as an Italian dish.