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Fancy Roast
Cook one dozen Eastern oysters in their own juice; add butter, pepper, salt, and one-half teacup of catsup; let it come to a boil; serve in hot dish on buttered toast.
A one-line oyster pan roast from the era when a dozen oysters was a cheap supper. The whole thing takes under five minutes, and the timing is the only difficulty.
- Cook the oysters barely at allShucked oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they plump, roughly one to two minutes in their own liquor. "Let it come to a boil" applies to the sauce; hold the oysters at a bare simmer or they turn to erasers.
- TeacupA teacup in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though some sources treat it as a full half-pint; it is not a standardised measure. On the 3/4-cup reading, half a teacup is around 6 tablespoons, which is a great deal of catsup for twelve oysters -- start with half that and taste.
- Catsup"Catsup" in this period did not necessarily mean tomato: mushroom and walnut catsups, thin, dark and sharply salty, were still in use alongside the tomato sort, which by the later nineteenth century was the commonest bottled kind. Modern tomato ketchup is far sweeter; if you want a sharper, less sweet character, mushroom catsup or a splash of Worcestershire with a little tomato gets closer.
- Eastern oystersThe Atlantic oyster, Crassostrea virginica. Any medium shucked oyster works; buy them in their liquor rather than drained, since that liquor is the cooking liquid here and there is no other.
- Butter and saltNo quantity is given. Two tablespoons of butter suits a dozen oysters. Salt cautiously -- oyster liquor and catsup are both already salty, and the dish is easy to overshoot.
- The panUse a small saucepan or skillet wide enough that the oysters sit in one layer, and have the buttered toast made and hot before you start. The sauce will not wait.
- YieldOne dozen oysters on toast serves two as a first course, or one as the light supper it was probably meant to be.
"Fancy roast" was oyster-house language rather than home-kitchen language: in nineteenth-century oyster saloons a "roast" is generally said to have meant oysters cooked quickly in their own liquor with butter in a shallow pan, as distinct from a genuine shell roast over coals. Oysters were still enormously abundant and cheap on the eastern seaboard when this book was compiled, which is why a cookbook could assume a dozen on hand and spend only one sentence on them. Bottled catsup as a seasoning -- mushroom and walnut versions predate the tomato one in English and American kitchens -- was the standard shortcut for giving a quick pan sauce depth, and its appearance here marks the recipe as belonging to the commercially bottled, urban end of home cooking rather than the farmhouse end.