Home › Ways Of Cooking Shellfish › Pepper (Mix bread and cracker crumbs)
Pepper (Mix bread and cracker crumbs)
Mix bread and cracker crumbs, and stir in butter. Put a 1/2 cup stale bread crumbs thin layer in bottom of a buttered shallow baking-dish, cover with oysters, and sprinkle with salt and pepper; add onehalf each oyster liquor and cream. Repeat, and cover top with remaining crumbs. Bake thirty minutes in hot oven. Never allow more than two layers of oysters for Scalloped Oysters; if three layers are used, the middle layer will be underdone, while others are properly cooked. A sprinkling of mace or grated nutmeg to each layer is considered by many an improvement. Sherry wine may be used in place of cream. Sautéd Oysters Clean one pint oysters, sprinkle on both sides with salt and pepper. Take up by the tough muscle with plated fork and dip in seasoned cracker crumbs. Put two tablespoons butter in hot frying-pan, add oysters, brown on one side, then turn and brown on the other.
Two oyster dishes in sequence: a scalloped bake and a quick sauté. The scallop is forgiving except in one respect, which the text states outright.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; "hot oven" is usually taken today as roughly 400-450F, and around 425F suits a shallow scalloped dish. Thirty minutes at that heat sets the liquor and crisps the top crumbs.
- Two layers, never threeThis is the hinge, and the recipe is explicit about it. Oysters cook by the time the crumbs brown, and a buried third layer sits in liquid at well under browning temperature while the top finishes.
- The crumb mixtureThe recipe says only to mix bread and cracker crumbs and stir in butter; the sole quantity given is 1/2 cup stale bread crumbs, with no ratio stated for the cracker crumbs. Cracker crumbs stay crisp on top, bread crumbs absorb the liquor below.
- Oyster liquor and creamStrain the liquor through a fine sieve or cloth first, as shells and grit settle in it. Use it sparingly: a shucked pint releases more liquid in the oven, and too much at the start leaves the dish soupy.
- Mace, nutmeg, sherryBoth are period touches worth keeping. A dry sherry in place of cream gives a leaner, sharper dish; grated nutmeg or blade mace, used with restraint, was a common nineteenth-century seasoning for creamed shellfish.
- "Plated fork" and the tough muscleThe tough muscle is the adductor, the firm nub that held the oyster to its shell; it is the only part sturdy enough to lift by. The recipe gives no reason for specifying a plated fork; it is sometimes linked to the old worry about silver darkening in contact with shellfish and eggs, though plated ware is itself silvered. Either way the distinction is irrelevant with stainless steel.
- SautéingDrain and blot the oysters before crumbing or the coating slides off, and get the butter foaming before they go in. A pint of oysters browns in about a minute a side; longer and they tighten and weep.
- YieldA pint of oysters serves three to four as a side dish or supper course, two as a main.
Scalloped oysters were standard American holiday and supper fare through the nineteenth century, when Atlantic oysters were cheap, shucked by the quart, and shipped inland by rail and ice in enormous volume. The name is generally traced to the scallop shell or small shallow dish the mixture was originally baked in rather than to any scalloping of the ingredients, and the same buttered-crumb-and-cream treatment was applied to salmon, chicken and potatoes in books of the period. Fannie Farmer's insistence on no more than two layers is characteristic of the Boston Cooking School's approach: a rule stated with a reason attached, so the cook understands the principle rather than just following the line.