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Russian Patties
½ tablespoon vinegar ¾ tablespoon lemon juice Yolks 2 eggs 1 tablespoon grated horseradish 2 tablespoons capers Salt and pepper Parboil oysters, drain, and reserve liquor; there should be one-half cup. Make sauce of butter, flour, stock, oyster liquor, and cream; add yolks of eggs, seasonings, and salt and pepper to taste. Add oysters, and as soon as oysters are heated, fill patty shells. 2 eggs
The text as printed here has lost most of its ingredient list — the butter, flour, stock, cream and oysters are called for in the method but never quantified, and the stray "2 eggs" at the end is a printer's artifact. What survives is the sauce's flavor profile and the sequence, both of which are workable if you supply proportions from a standard velouté.
- The missing measuresThe lemon juice reads ¾ tablespoon, as the printed page has it. The vinegar, lemon juice, horseradish, capers and egg yolks are the only amounts given; the butter, flour, stock, cream, and oysters have no quantities here, so treat those as missing rather than guessing at the original figures.
- Patty shellsThese are baked puff-pastry cases — vol-au-vent or bouchées — not the modern meat patty. Frozen puff pastry shells do the job; bake and cool them before filling so they do not soften.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, roughly 30 seconds to a minute in their own liquor. The recipe's later instruction to add them "as soon as oysters are heated" is the hinge: any real simmering in the finished sauce turns them tough and shrunken.
- Reserve the liquorThe half cup of strained oyster liquor is the whole point of the parboiling step. Strain it through a fine sieve to catch shell grit, and let it stand for the sand to settle if the oysters were unwashed.
- Egg yolks off the heatTemper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return them, and hold the pan below a simmer. Once yolks are in, boiling will curdle the sauce; the acid from the vinegar and lemon makes it more likely, not less.
- Acid goes in lastVinegar, lemon juice, horseradish and capers all lose their edge with heat. Add them after the yolks, taste, and adjust — the sauce should read sharp against the sweetness of the oysters.
- Sauce proportionsFor the half cup of oyster liquor, a standard base is 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, ½ cup stock and ½ cup cream, which yields roughly 1½ cups of sauce.
- YieldAbout a pint of filling, enough for six to eight medium patty shells as a first course. Fill at the table or immediately before serving.
"Russian" in American and English cookery of this period rarely signaled anything geographic; it was more often attached to a flavor set — sour cream or cream sharpened with vinegar, horseradish, capers, sometimes mustard. Cookbooks of the period carried long Entrées chapters of exactly this sort: small, sauced, pastry-cased dishes intended to fill the slot between fish and roast in a formal multi-course dinner, a structure taken from French practice. Oysters carried these dishes because they were cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast through the nineteenth century, appearing creamed, scalloped, fried, in soup and, as here, in pastry. The heavy use of oysters in turn-of-the-century American entrées is a reasonable index of how much less they cost then than now.