Home › Dressing Shell Fish › Dressing Shell Fish: Open
Dressing Shell Fish: Open
OYSTERS. 203. TO FEED.-Put them into water, and wash them with a birchbesom till quite clean; then lay them round side downwards in a pan: sprinkle with flour or oatmeal and salt, and cover with water; do the same every day, and they will fatten. The water should be pretty salt, and rather more so than sea-water. Bay salt is the best for the purpose when it is at hand. 204. To BOIL. - Open the shells, and clean and drain them into boiling water; then drop the oysters into a saucepan of boiling water, and boil them gently for three or four minutes. Serve in the shells with a little cold butter, vinegar, and pepper. 205. TO STEW. - Open and separate the liquor from them, then wash them from the grit; strain the liquor, and put with the oysters a bit of mace or lemon-peel, and a few white peppercorns. Simmer them very gently, and put some cream and a little flour and butter. Serve with sippets. 206. TO ROAST. - Place the oysters unopened between the bars of a fire or in a charcoal stove. They require about six or eight minutes' time. 207. TO SCALLOP. - Put them with crumbs of bread, pepper, salt, into scallop-shells or saucers, and bake before the fire in a Dutch oven. Cream mixed with the bread is a great improvement. 208 TO FRY.-Make a batter of flour, milk, and eggs, season it a very little with pepper and salt, dip the oysters into it, and fry them a fine yellow-brown. A little nutmeg should be put into the seasoning, and a few crumbs of bread into the flour. 209. DUTCH OYSTERS. - Roll rock oysters in yolk of egg, then dip them in grated bread crumbs and white pepper, one by one, and fry them in butter: serve with melted butter in a sauce-tureer. 210. AS LOAVES. - Open them and save the liquor; wash them in it; then strain it through a sieve, and put a little of it into a tosser with a bit of butter and flour, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, and a little cream. Stew them, and cut in dice; put them into rolls sold for the purpose. 211. AS SAUSAGES. - Take a quarter of a pound of chicken or veal, three ounces of crumbs of bread, one ounce of beef-suet, thirty oysters chopped, and half the yolk of an egg; to be seasoned with mace, cayenne, and black pepper, and made either into balls, or of a long form, and fried. To be served with a rich brown gravy. 212. AS TOAST. - Pour some well-thickened and flavoured oystersauce upon a buttered toast. The number of oysters is from two and a half to three score, depending on the size of the corner-dish. This is very good for a top or bottom dish in a second course. 213. TO PICKLE. - Wash four dozen of the largest oysters you can get in their own liquor, wipe them dry, strain the liquor off, adding to it a dessert-spoonful of pepper, two blades of mace, a table-spoonful of salt, unless the liquor is already very salt, three of white wine, and four of vinegar. 214. OYSTER PATTIES. -Put a fine puff-paste into small patty-pans, and cover with paste, with a bit of bread in each; and against they are baked have ready the following to fill them with, after taking out the bread :-Take off the beards of the oysters, cut the other parts into small bits, put them in a small tosser, with a grate of nutmeg, a very little white pepper and salt, a morsel of lemon-peel cut so small that you can scarcely see it, a very little cream, and a little of the oyster liquor. Simmer for a few minutes before filling; then serve.
A page of Victorian oyster cookery gathered under one head, running from keeping live oysters to patties. Most of the cooked preparations translate directly; two of the entries do not, and are flagged first.
- Do not attempt 203 (To Feed)Holding live oysters for days in standing salted water at room temperature is exactly the condition in which Vibrio species multiply, and the oatmeal-and-flour feeding adds a nutrient source. Oysters bought today are already purified and should be kept at refrigerator temperature, dry, cupped side down, under a damp cloth, and eaten within a couple of days.
- Do not attempt 213 (To Pickle)The oysters are never brought to any temperature at all: they are wiped, put in their own strained liquor with vinegar and wine, and that is the whole method. There is no heating step, no acidity that has been measured, and no storage instruction, so this is raw shellfish held in a weak brine of unknown pH. Use a current tested recipe if you want pickled oysters.
- A tosserA small saucepan with a long handle, used for shaking and tossing contents over the fire. Any small heavy pan does the work in 205, 210 and 214.
- A scoreTwenty. The two and a half to three score of 212 is fifty to sixty oysters, the number depending, as the entry says, on the size of the dish.
- Never let a stew boilThis is the hinge of 205, 210 and 214. Oysters are cooked the moment their edges ruffle, roughly a minute or two in hot liquid; beyond that they tighten and turn to rubber. The three or four minutes of gentle boiling in 204 is longer than modern practice would allow — take them out at two.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, fried or toasted and set round the edge of the dish. Croutons serve the same purpose.
- Dutch ovenNot the modern lidded casserole but a tin reflector box open on one side, set facing the fire. For the scalloped oysters of 207, bake in a hot oven, or run them under a hot grill, until the crumbs colour.
- BeardsThe dark frilled gill fringe removed in 214. It is edible but chewy and holds grit; trimming it matters more in a delicate filling than in a stew.
- Blind baking in 214The bit of bread in each patty-pan is a pastry weight. Baking beans or a small foil-lined weight does the same job; bake until the cases are set and coloured, then fill just before serving so the pastry does not soften.
- Rolls sold for the purposeSmall crusty rolls hollowed out and crisped; the trade once sold them ready for filling. Any dinner roll, top cut off and crumb pulled out, will hold the creamed oysters of 210.
Oysters were cheap in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and the sheer length of this section is the evidence -- a dozen entries under one head, including ways to stretch them into sausages and toast for a second course. Beds in the Thames estuary, at Whitstable, Colchester and along the Welsh and Scottish coasts supplied the cities in enormous quantity, and oysters turned up as a bulking ingredient in steak pies and stuffings as much as a delicacy in their own right. The instruction to fatten oysters at home in salted water reflects a period when they arrived in the shell by cart and boat and might sit for days before use; bay salt, called for here, is coarse sea salt evaporated in shallow pans rather than mined rock salt. Over-dredging and pollution collapsed the native beds late in the century, and by the 1900s oysters had shifted from working-class staple to luxury, which is why the abundance assumed on this page reads so strangely now.