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Oyster Omelet
12 oysters
1 cup cream
½ tablespoon flour
6 eggs
2 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper
Chop the oysters. Make a sauce of the flour, butter and the cream.
Add the well-beaten eggs, season with salt and pepper, stir in the oysters and cook as a plain omelet.
A rich, saucy omelet in the French style, closer to a soft scramble bound with béchamel than to the folded diner omelet. The whole thing depends on stopping the cooking early.
- The hinge: chopped oysters cook in secondsShucked oysters firm up almost immediately and turn to erasers if held over heat. Stir them in at the very end, off the direct flame if need be, and count on the residual heat of the eggs to do the work.
- Six eggs is a large panSix eggs plus a cup of cream and a dozen oysters will not manage in an 8-inch skillet. Use a 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, or split the mixture into two omelets. Serves four generously.
- The sauce is a thin béchamelThe sauce is barely thickened -- Half a tablespoon of flour to two tablespoons butter and a cup of cream gives a very light cream sauce, not a paste. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before the cream goes in so it does not taste raw, and let it cool a little before the eggs join it or they will scramble in the pan.
- Drain the oysters, and consider the liquorShucked oysters carry a good deal of salty liquid that will loosen the mixture. Drain them well; a tablespoon of the strained liquor stirred into the sauce adds more flavor than the oysters alone will.
- Season lateOysters and their liquor are already salty. Season the sauce lightly and correct at the end rather than salting to taste before the oysters go in.
- "Cook as a plain omelet"The direction assumes a technique the reader already knows: moderate heat, stirring the mass gently as it sets, then letting the bottom take the barest color and folding or rolling it out onto a hot platter. With this much cream the center will still be loose when it leaves the pan.
- Buying oystersA dozen shucked oysters is roughly 8 to 10 ounces, about a half-pint container. Shucked oysters sold by volume were available from fish dealers in this period, so a modern half-pint of pre-shucked oysters is a reasonable stand-in.
Oysters were cheap protein in American cities well into the early twentieth century, sold shucked by the pint from barrels and carts, and they turn up in period cookbooks in places a modern reader would not expect them: in stuffings, in soups, in patties, and here folded into eggs for breakfast or a light supper. The Butterick book, published by the pattern company as part of its broader domestic-advice publishing, seems to be aimed at a middle-class household cook, and the recipe's structure tells you something about the era's training: it assumes she already knows how to make a butter-and-flour sauce and how to cook a plain omelet, so it spends its words only on what is different. The combination of oysters with a cream sauce is a direct descendant of nineteenth-century oyster fricassees and creamed oysters, dishes whose retreat from most home kitchens is often attributed to overharvesting and pollution pushing oyster prices out of the everyday range.