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Union Grill
Clean one pint of oysters and drain off all the liquor possible. Put oysters in chafing-dish, and as liquor flows from oysters, remove with a spoon, and so continue until oysters are plump. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add two tablespoons butter. Serve on zephyrettes. 1 pint oysters
A two-minute chafing-dish supper that lives or dies on when you stop cooking. Everything here is about drawing off liquor and pulling the oysters the moment their edges ruffle.
- The hinge: stop when the edges curlShucked oysters cook quickly over direct heat, roughly 2 to 3 minutes, firming up as the frills at the edge ruffle. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery; "until oysters are plump" is the recipe's own doneness signal.
- A pint of oystersThat is a shucked pint, about 16 to 24 oysters depending on size, sold in tubs at a fish counter. Buy them refrigerated with clear, not cloudy, liquor and use them the day you get them.
- ZephyrettesA thin, crisp unsweetened wafer cracker, popular around 1900 and no longer sold under that name. Any plain thin water cracker, oyster cracker, or a saltine works; so does toast cut small.
- The chafing-dishA shallow metal blazer over a spirit lamp, which gave gentle, adjustable heat at the table. A skillet or wide saute pan over medium heat is the equivalent; keep it low enough that the oysters never boil in their own liquor.
- Removing the liquorSpooning off the liquid as it releases is the whole technique: it keeps the oysters grilling rather than poaching, so they brown slightly and concentrate. Save the liquor for a sauce or soup rather than discarding it.
- Butter lastThe two tablespoons of butter go in at the end, once the pan is nearly dry, so it coats the oysters instead of being diluted. A squeeze of lemon or a dash of cayenne is period-appropriate and does no harm.
- YieldServes two as a light supper or four as an appetizer, which is the scale a chafing-dish was meant for.
The chafing-dish recipe belongs to a specific moment: between roughly 1890 and 1915, the spirit-lamp chafing-dish was the fashionable equipment of late suppers, college rooms and after-theatre entertaining, since it let a hostess or a bachelor cook at the table without a kitchen. Oysters were the natural material for it, being cheap, abundant on the Atlantic coast and cooked in the time it took to mix a drink. "Grill" here seems to mean simply cooking in a dry pan rather than in a sauce or a stew, which would explain why the recipe insists on spooning the liquor away; the name "Union" is not explained and most likely points to a club, hotel or restaurant dish of the sort New England cookbooks routinely borrowed without comment. Zephyrettes, the cracker specified, were a branded-style thin wafer of the period and their disappearance is a good measure of how much of the ordinary grocery shelf of the era has since vanished.