Home › Fish › Little Pigs in Blankets
Little Pigs in Blankets
24 large oysters
Salt and pepper
24 very thin short slices fat
Parsley bacon
Season the oysters with salt and pepper. Wrap one oyster in each slice of bacon and fasten with a toothpick. Heat a saucepan and put in the little pigs; cook just long enough to crisp the bacon, about five minutes. Cut slices of toast into quarters and place one pig in its blanket on each small slice of toast. Serve immediately, garnished with parsley.
A late-Victorian and Edwardian cocktail savoury, and one of the simplest things in the fish chapter. Two details need attention: the ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column setting, and five minutes will not crisp raw bacon.
- The garbled ingredient listRead it as four items: 24 large oysters; salt and pepper; 24 very thin short slices of fat bacon; parsley. The word "Parsley" has slipped in from the second column.
- Bacon thickness"Very thin short slices fat bacon" means streaky bacon sliced thin enough to wrap and to render fast. Modern thick-cut bacon will still be flabby long after the oyster is done; buy the thinnest streaky you can find, or stretch each slice with the back of a knife.
- The hinge: bacon time versus oyster timeAn oyster is cooked in about two minutes, when the edges just ruffle. Bacon needs longer. One common modern fix is to part-cook the bacon first, until the fat is translucent but still pliable, then wrap and finish. Otherwise the oyster tightens into rubber while the blanket is still raw.
- Dry the oystersShucked oysters carry a lot of liquor. Drain them and blot them dry before seasoning, or the bacon steams instead of crisping.
- "Heat a saucepan"Read as a heavy pan set dry, with no added fat, the bacon supplying its own; the recipe calls for none. A skillet or cast-iron pan is the modern equivalent. A hot oven works better for a crowd: about 425F on a rack over a sheet pan, turning once, roughly 10 minutes.
- ToothpicksWooden cocktail picks; soak them briefly if you use the oven so they do not scorch. Warn guests, or pull them before serving.
- Yield and servingTwenty-four pieces, which is about six to eight as a first course or savoury. The toast quarters should be cut small and made at the last minute; they go leathery if they sit.
"Pigs in blankets" in this period usually meant oysters in bacon, though the name also covered other wrapped morsels; the sausage version is a later, largely mid-twentieth-century American reading of the name, and in Britain the phrase still attaches to sausage and bacon at Christmas. The oyster form belongs to the era of the savoury, the hot, salty single bite served at the end of a formal dinner or handed round with drinks, alongside devils on horseback and angels on horseback (oysters in bacon under yet another name). Its placement in the Fish section of a 1911 Butterick manual is a good reminder of how cheap and ordinary oysters still were in American cities: shucked oysters were sold by the quart from carts and markets. The prices, and the beds, gave out later.