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Beefsteak with Oysters
I steak
1 tablespoon sifted flour
1 quart oysters
3 tablespoons butter
Set the oysters, with a very little of their juice, over the fire; when they come to a boil, remove any scum and stir in the butter, in which the sifted flour has been rubbed. Boil one minute, pour over the steak and serve at once.
A beefsteak sauce rather than a whole dinner: the book assumes you know how to broil a steak and gives you only the oyster gravy that goes over it. Two details carry the dish -- the butter-and-flour paste and the fact that the oysters barely cook.
- The hinge: one minute means one minuteOysters firm up the moment their edges curl and turn leathery within a few minutes of hard boiling. Bring them just to the boil, stir in the thickening, count sixty seconds and take the pan off the heat.
- A quart of oystersThis means shucked oysters with their liquor, sold today in pint and quart tubs at fish counters; a quart runs to a couple of dozen or more medium oysters and weighs around 2 lb with the liquor. It is a generous amount for one steak and would arguably dress two.
- "A very little of their juice"Drain most of the liquor off and keep only a few tablespoons, or the sauce will be thin and grey. The oysters release plenty more as they heat.
- Butter rubbed with flourThis is beurre manié -- 3 tablespoons softened butter worked with 1 tablespoon flour into a smooth paste, then whisked into the simmering liquid in small pieces. It thickens without the raw-flour taste of a slurry and without a separate roux pan.
- SkimmingThe scum that rises is largely coagulated protein. Lift it off with a spoon before the butter goes in, as the recipe directs.
- "1 steak"The book specifies neither cut, thickness nor number of servings; it assumes a cook who already knows how to broil a steak. Have it broiled and ready so the sauce arrives hot.
- SeasoningThe original lists none. Oyster liquor is already salty, so season the sauce at the end; a grind of pepper and a little lemon or cayenne are period-appropriate additions.
Oysters were cheap protein in nineteenth-century America, shipped inland by barrel and rail and eaten by people who would never have called them a luxury, which is why they turn up stretching stews, stuffing turkeys and, as here, extending a single steak to feed a table. The pairing of beef and oysters runs through English cookery too -- steak and oyster pudding and pie were standard chophouse fare -- and generally traced to the same economics: the oysters bulked out the more expensive meat. By the time Butterick, the dress-pattern company, was issuing household manuals, the great East Coast beds were already being fished down hard, and within a generation oysters had shifted from everyday food to something ordered specially. The recipe's brevity looks like a period habit: broiling a steak seems to have needed no explanation, and the book prints only the part a cook might not know.