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Pepper (Oyster liquor Wash oysters)
1 pint oysters 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour. ¼ cup butter 1/4 cup flour.
Oyster liquor Wash oysters, reserve liquor, heat, strain, add oysters, and cook until plump. Remove oysters, and make a sauce of butter, flour, oyster liquor, and milk. Add oysters, and season with salt and pepper.
Cucumber Sauce I Grate two cucumbers, drain, and season with salt, pepper, and vinegar. Serve with Broiled Fish.
Two sauces run together here in the original printing: a creamed oyster sauce for boiled or baked fish, and a raw cucumber relish for broiled fish. Neither gives quantities for the sauce base, which was standard practice in this book — readers were expected to know the house proportions for a white sauce.
- The hinge: do not overcook the oysters"Cook until plump" means about one to two minutes in the barely simmering liquor, until the edges just ruffle. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery, and they will continue to firm up in the hot sauce after they go back in.
- Missing proportionsFor the sauce, a workable white-sauce ratio is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 cup liquid — here the strained oyster liquor made up to a cup with milk. A pint of shucked oysters will give something under a cup of liquor, so top up with milk as needed.
- Straining mattersOyster liquor carries shell grit and sand. Heat it, let it settle, then pour it through a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or muslin. Skimming alone will not catch the fine sand.
- Salt lastOyster liquor is already saline and reduces further as it heats. Season the finished sauce, not the base, or it will end up over-salted.
- Buying oystersShucked oysters sold in tubs come with their liquor, which suits this recipe. If you shuck your own, work over a bowl to catch every drop.
- Cucumber sauceGrate on the coarse side of a box grater, salt lightly, and let the shreds drain in a sieve for 15–20 minutes before pressing out the water — otherwise the vinegar dressing turns to soup on the plate. Serve it cold against hot broiled fish.
- YieldReckoning on a pint of oysters in a cup of sauce, enough for about four as an accompaniment; the two grated cucumbers give roughly a cup once drained.
Oyster sauce of this kind — the oysters poached in their own liquor, the liquor then thickened with butter, flour and milk — was the standard American accompaniment to boiled cod, halibut or haddock through the nineteenth century, and it is often said to appear in the sauce chapter of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Oysters were then cheap and everywhere: East Coast beds are generally described as supplying them by the barrel, with city cooks buying them shucked by the quart, so a sauce built on a pint of oysters was a household economy rather than a luxury. The cucumber sauce beside it belongs to a different tradition entirely — the cold, sharp, uncooked relishes served with oily broiled or fried fish, generally traced in English and American cookery to the long-standing pairing of cucumber with salmon and mackerel.</td>