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Sauce (Teaspoon salt Few grains)
¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Fry almonds until well browned, using enough butter to prevent almonds from burning. Mix remaining ingredients, pour over nuts, and serve as soon as thoroughly heated. Serve with oysters.
A chafing-dish garnish rather than a sauce in the modern sense: almonds browned in butter, moistened, and spooned over oysters at the table. Everything depends on the almonds, which turn from gold to bitter in seconds.
- The measurements"14 teaspoon salt" is almost certainly a quarter teaspoon, the fraction lost in setting. "Few grains cayenne" means a pinch — less than an eighth of a teaspoon; add it cautiously and taste.
- What the almonds should beThe recipe does not say, but blanched almonds, split or shredded, suit the dish; skin-on almonds brown unevenly in butter.
- Browning is the hingeAlmonds in butter go from pale to gold to acrid in under a minute. Keep them moving over moderate heat, pull the pan the moment they smell toasted, and remember they carry on colouring off the heat.
- Butter quantityThe recipe leaves it to judgement: "enough butter to prevent almonds from burning" means enough to coat the nuts and conduct heat, not enough to fry them.
- The chafing dishIf made in a chafing dish -- the blazer pan would sit directly over the flame for the browning; with a hot burner, set the hot-water pan underneath once the liquid goes in so the mixture only warms through.
- "As soon as thoroughly heated"Heat the assembled mixture just until it steams. Held longer, the almonds soften and lose the whole point of the dish.
- The oystersThis is a dressing for oysters cooked separately — panned, broiled, or briefly poached in their own liquor until the edges just curl, about two minutes. Any longer and they toughen, and no sauce will disguise it.
The chafing dish had a long vogue in American households between roughly 1890 and the First World War, and cookbooks of the period gave it considerable attention: cooking at the table was the entertainment as much as the food, suited to late suppers, bachelor rooms and hostesses without a cook on duty. Oysters were the natural material — cheap, abundant on both coasts, and needing only a minute's heat, so nothing could go badly wrong in front of guests. Browned almonds with butter and cayenne belong to the same period's fondness for a crisp, faintly hot garnish over soft shellfish, a habit generally traced to French service rather than to any single dish.