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Oysters à la Somerset
Salt. Pepper. 1 pint selected oysters 1 tablespoon chopped onion 2 tablespoons chopped mushrooms 3 tablespoons butter 1/3 cup oyster liquor 1/3 cup Chicken Stock 4 tablespoons flour.
The page as printed gives the ingredient list only — the method has been lost in transcription, and one quantity is garbled. What follows covers the measurements, the oyster handling that decides whether the dish works, and what the ingredient list itself tells you about the intended sauce.
- The liquid measurementsThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 1/3 cup oyster liquor and 1/3 cup chicken stock, as our text now gives.
- A pint of oystersThe book measures shucked oysters by liquid volume, not by count. "Selected" grade means a medium-large shucked oyster sold loose in its liquor; the number to a pint varies with the grader. Modern tubs are usually sold by the pint or half-pint, so the measure translates directly.
- "Selected" oystersAn old grading term for size, sitting between "standards" and "counts." Any medium to large shucked oyster will do; avoid the smallest grades, which will vanish into the sauce.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid packed with the shucked oysters. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth before use, since it carries shell grit. If your tub is short of liquor, do not substitute more stock without tasting — apart from whatever salt the stock brings, the liquor is the list's only seasoning.
- The hinge: oyster timingOysters in a sauce like this need only to be heated until the edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes. Anything approaching a quarter of an hour, as older entrée directions sometimes specify, leaves them shrunken and rubbery. Add them last, off the strongest heat.
- What the ingredients implyThree tablespoons butter with chopped onion and mushroom, then liquor and stock, is the standard early-1900s pattern for a light cooked sauce — sweat the aromatics in the butter, add the liquids, reduce or thicken, finish with the oysters. Because the printed method is missing here, use a complete edition of the book rather than reconstructing it from the list alone.
- YieldA pint of oysters in this quantity of sauce serves four as an entrée course, or six if it is spooned onto toast points or into pastry shells.
Oyster entrées fill several pages of period cookbooks for a plain reason: at the turn of the twentieth century oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans. Names of this kind — à la plus a place or title — were the standard restaurant grammar of the period, borrowed from French menu convention and attached freely to hotel and household dishes; Somerset here signals a genteel English association rather than any documented origin, and the pattern of butter, onion, mushroom, oyster liquor and chicken stock is a light sauce base of a familiar kind. The truncated state of this particular page is a reminder of how these books were used: consulted for a familiar formula by cooks who already knew what to do with the list.