Baked Oysters
30 oysters in the shell
Salt and pepper
Butter
Wash the oyster shells thoroughly by scrubbing with a brush. Place with the deep shell down in a baking-pan in a very hot oven, bake until the shells open, remove the upper shells, add a little butter, salt and pepper to each oyster, and serve in the undersbel Fish and their garnishes
About the simplest thing that can be done with an oyster: heat applied to a closed shell until the muscle gives way. Everything depends on the oysters themselves and on the oven being genuinely hot.
- "A very hot oven"The book gives no temperature. In period usage the phrase is generally taken as somewhere around 450-500F. A cooler oven will tend to cook the oysters slowly before the shells release.
- TimingThe shells usually gape in roughly 6-10 minutes depending on size. Note that an opened shell is not in itself proof the oyster is cooked through; equally, oysters held in a hot oven well past that point shrink and turn rubbery.
- Choosing the oystersBuy them live, tightly closed, and heavy with liquor. Discard any that are already gaping and do not close when tapped, and any with cracked shells, before they go anywhere near the oven.
- Storage before cookingKeep them cup-side down in the refrigerator under a damp cloth, never sealed in a bag or sitting in fresh water, and cook within a day or two of purchase.
- Setting them in the pan"Deep shell down" is the whole point: it holds the liquor. A bed of rock salt or crumpled foil in the pan keeps each shell level so nothing spills.
- Opening and dressingUse a towel and a short knife to lift off the flat top shell; run the blade along the inside to cut the muscle free. Butter, salt and pepper go on while the shell is still hot enough to melt them.
- YieldThirty oysters serve four generously as a first course, or two or three as a light main dish with bread.
Baking oysters in their own shells is often said to be among the oldest ways of cooking them, and it is the one that survives on coasts everywhere, because it needs no shucking skill and no stock pot: the fire opens the shell and the oyster cooks in its own liquor. When this book appeared, oysters were still cheap, abundant, everyday food in American cities, sold by the barrel and hawked from carts, and a Butterick reader would have thought thirty in the shell an unremarkable quantity. The pattern-company cookbooks aimed at the household without a professional cook, and the instruction here is bare, as it is throughout the book. Overfishing and pollution in the Chesapeake and elsewhere through the twentieth century turned that abundance into a comparative luxury, which is the main reason the recipe reads more extravagantly now than it did then.