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Oysters in Brown Sauce
1 cup oyster liquor and set aside for sauce. 1/2 cup milk ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon anchovy sauce 1/8 teaspoon pepper Parboil and drain oysters, reserve liquor, heat, strain, Brown butter, add flour, and stir until well browned; then add oyster liquor, milk, seasonings, and oysters. For filling patty cases or vol-au-vents. 1 pint of oysters 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1 cup oyster liquor
The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription — the quantities run both before and after the method — but the dish itself is straightforward: oysters parboiled, then bound in a brown roux sauce sharpened with anchovy. Read it as 1 pint oysters, 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 cup strained oyster liquor, 1/2 cup milk, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon anchovy sauce, 1/8 teaspoon pepper.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesParboil means barely a minute -- Bring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, then lift them out. They finish in the hot sauce; anything longer and they tighten into erasers.
- Strain the liquor twiceOyster liquor carries shell grit and sand. Heat it, then pour it through a fine sieve lined with a doubled cheesecloth. A gritty sauce cannot be rescued.
- Browning the butter and flourThis is a brown roux, and it is the point of the dish. Cook butter and flour together over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture smells nutty and turns the color of a walnut shell — five to eight minutes. Stop short of any acrid smell; scorched flour will not thicken and tastes bitter.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled condiment of anchovy, vinegar and spice, standard in Anglo-American larders of the period and still sold in Britain. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire, stands in for it.
- Salt with restraintThe 1 1/2 teaspoons assumes the anchovy sauce and oyster liquor of the day. Between the liquor, the anchovy and any salt in modern butter, this can easily overshoot. Add half, then taste at the end.
- Liquor may fall shortA pint of shucked oysters does not always yield a full cup of liquor. Make up the difference with fish stock, clam juice or water rather than more milk, which will mute the browned roux.
- Vol-au-vents and patty casesBaked puff pastry shells, hollowed out. Frozen puff pastry shells work; fill them at the table, since a brown sauce will soften the pastry within minutes.
- YieldRoughly enough to fill six to eight small pastry cases, or about four servings over toast; the original gives no yield.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats oysters as an everyday protein rather than a luxury, and the chapter it sits in gathers a range of preparations — scalloped, fricasseed, broiled, in a pan roast. Oysters were cheap and abundant along the northeast coast through the nineteenth century, hauled in from the beds of Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay and the Massachusetts shore and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans. The brown sauce here and the vol-au-vent case both come out of the French repertoire that American cookery schools were teaching as the mark of a well-run table, while the bottled anchovy sauce is an English survival, descended from the fish sauces that flavored British cooking long before Worcestershire was bottled. The combination — French technique, English seasoning, New England shellfish — is characteristic of the book as a whole.