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Roasted Oysters
Oysters for roasting should be bought in the shell. Wash thoroughly, scrubbing with a brush. Put in a dripping-pan, and cook in a hot oven until shells part. Open, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve in the deep halves of the shells.
Four sentences of instruction that depend entirely on the quality of the oysters and the heat of the oven. Both need a little translation.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; in modern terms take it as a fully preheated oven around 450F. The point is a fast blast that steams the oyster in its own liquor and pops the hinge, not a slow bake that dries it out.
- TimingThe original gives none because the shells announce it. Expect roughly 6-10 minutes depending on size, and pull them as they gape. Oysters left in past that point shrink and turn firm.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting pan or half-sheet pan. Arrange the oysters cupped (deep) side down so the liquor stays in the shell rather than spilling into the pan.
- Buying them liveShells must be tightly closed, or should snap shut when tapped. Any oyster that stays open before cooking is dead and goes in the bin. Store them cup-side down under a damp cloth in the refrigerator, never sealed in a bag or sitting in fresh water.
- Shells that do not partA few always stay shut simply because the adductor muscle held. If the oyster has had the same heat as the rest, pry it open with an oyster knife and judge it by smell; discard anything that smells other than clean and briny.
- Opening them hotUse a folded towel and an oyster knife, running the blade along the flat top shell to cut the muscle free. Loosen the meat from the deep half before serving so it lifts cleanly.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper is the whole of it here, and with good oysters that holds up. Melted butter and a wedge of lemon are common with oysters of the period and are not out of place.
- YieldReckon six oysters a head as a first course, a dozen as a light main. They must go to the table straight from the oven; they are poor once cold.
Roasting oysters in the shell is one of the oldest ways to cook them, older than any cookbook, and needs nothing but fire; the recipe survives here in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book because oysters were still cheap, plentiful and eaten in enormous quantity in the Northeast. Boston and New York supported oyster cellars and saloons where they were served raw, stewed, fried, scalloped and roasted, and Fannie Farmer's book gives all those methods within a few pages of one another. What is telling is how brief the instruction is: the shell is its own cooking vessel and its own timer, so there was nothing more to say. The oyster beds of Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake were being fished hard through exactly these decades, and the decline of that supply in the twentieth century is part of why a dish that once counted as everyday reads as a luxury now.