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Creamed Oysters
1 Pint Oysters 1/2 Cup Beef Stock 2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 3 Tablespoons Butter 1/4 Teaspoon Salt Pepper to Taste 1 Teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce Few Drops Onion Strain Rinse the oysters and drain. the oyster liquor and cook the oysters in it till the edges begin to curl. Make a sauce of the butter, cornstarch, beef stock, and half cup of the oyster liquor.
Season. Add the oysters, cook about one minute and serve in patties.
A short, brisk oyster dish that depends entirely on restraint at the stove. Two things in the original need untangling before you start: the printed text has its clauses out of order, and "patties" is not what it sounds like.
- The scrambled first lineRead it as: rinse the oysters, drain them, strain the oyster liquor, then cook the oysters in that liquor until the edges begin to curl. The typesetter has shuffled the phrases.
- The hinge: how long to cook oystersEdges curling takes roughly 60 to 90 seconds in barely simmering liquor, and the second cooking in the sauce should be under a minute as the recipe says. Anything approaching a full simmer for several minutes shrinks them to erasers.
- "Serve in patties"Period shorthand for patty shells, i.e. baked puff-pastry cases or vol-au-vents. Frozen puff pastry shells are the direct modern equivalent; buttered toast points also work.
- "Few Drops Onion"Almost certainly onion juice, which period recipes obtained by grating an onion and squeezing the pulp through a sieve or cloth. Grate a little onion and squeeze it through a sieve, or use a small pinch of onion powder; the point is a whisper of allium, not visible onion.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters sold by volume, about 16 to 24 medium oysters and roughly 12 to 16 oz by weight. Buy them in their liquor, since the liquor is half the sauce here.
- Beef stock with shellfishNot an error; the recipe means what it says. Beef stock appears as a savoury base in American recipes of this period, and here it gives the dish a darker, almost devilled character that the Worcestershire reinforces.
- SaltAdd the quarter teaspoon at the end, not the start. Oyster liquor and Worcestershire are both salty, and reduction concentrates them.
- Sauce methodCook the butter and cornstarch together briefly, then whisk in the beef stock and the half cup of strained liquor off the heat before returning it to a simmer. Cornstarch thickens fully at a boil and thins again if held there long, so bring it just to the bubble and stop.
- YieldServes four as a first course in pastry shells, or two or three as a light supper on toast.
Creamed oysters in pastry cases were a fixture of American entertaining from the 1880s through the 1920s, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and tins. The dish belongs to the same family as oyster patties, oyster cocktail and scalloped oysters, all of which appear in household manuals of the period as company food that could be assembled quickly from a can or a bucket of shucked oysters. Thickening with cornstarch rather than a flour roux, and using beef stock instead of milk despite the name "creamed," are both consistent with American recipes of this period, though neither on its own fixes the recipe's date or origin.