Home › Recipes For The Chafing-Dish › Oysters à la D'Uxelles
Oysters à la D'Uxelles
2 tablespoons chopped mushrooms 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon lemon juice Few grains cayenne 1 egg yolk 1 tablespoon Sherry wine Re- Clean oysters, heat to boiling-point, and drain. serve liquor and strain through double thickness of cheesecloth; cloth; there should be three-fourths cup. Cook butter mushrooms five minutes, add flour, and oyster liquor gradually ; then cook three minutes. Add seasonings, oysters , egg, and Sherry wine. Serve on zephyrettes or pieces of toasted bread. 1 pint oysters
A chafing-dish oyster stew thickened with roux and finished with egg yolk. The text as printed is scrambled by the scanner: the pint of oysters trails at the end of the ingredient list, and the line about butter and mushrooms has lost a word. Read it as: cook the mushrooms in the butter five minutes, stir in the flour, then add the oyster liquor gradually.
- The hinge: do not boil after the egg goes inThe yolk goes in at the very end, with the oysters and Sherry. The book does not say to lift the pan off the heat, but if the sauce returns to a boil the yolk will curdle into grains, so it is safest to pull it off the flame first -- a chafing dish over a spirit lamp is gentler in this respect than a gas burner.
- Heating the oysters"Heat to boiling-point" means bring them up in their own liquor just until the edges ruffle, then lift them out at once. That is a minute or two at most. They then finish in the hot sauce off the heat; anything longer and they tighten and weep.
- Oyster liquorThe recipe expects three-fourths cup of strained liquor from a pint of oysters; depending on how they were shucked and packed you may get less. If so, make up the difference with milk, cream or water rather than reducing the sauce, which would push the salt too high.
- ZephyrettesA brand of very thin, crisp unsweetened wafer cracker sold at the turn of the century, used the way we now use a water biscuit. Any thin crisp cracker or a slice of dry toast works; the point is a base that stays brittle under the sauce.
- MushroomsTwo tablespoons chopped is a small quantity by modern habit, roughly one or two button mushrooms. Cook them until the pan is dry before the flour goes in, or the sauce turns watery.
- QuantitiesA pint of shucked oysters is roughly 16 to 24 medium oysters and weighs about a pound with its liquor, rather less drained. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour make a light sauce for that volume, not a thick one.
- YieldNo yield is given; a pint of oysters in this quantity of sauce would stretch to about four as a first course or supper dish, fewer as a main. It does not hold or reheat; the egg yolk and the oysters both object.
Duxelles is the classic French preparation of mushrooms chopped fine and cooked down in butter, generally traced to the kitchen of the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose cook was François Pierre de La Varenne, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the name attaches to the preparation long after the seventeenth century. By Fannie Farmer's day the phrase "à la d'Uxelles" had drifted loose from any strict formula and signified, in American cookbooks, simply that minced mushroom was in the sauce. The dish sits in the chafing-dish chapter for a reason: the chafing dish was the fashionable equipment of the 1890s and 1900s, used for late suppers, club rooms and after-theatre entertaining, where cooking at the table was part of the performance. Oysters were the natural material — cheap, abundant on both coasts, sold shucked by the pint, and cooked in two minutes flat, which is exactly what a spirit lamp can manage.