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Oyster Sauce
1 pint small oysters
1 cup medium white sauce seasoned
Heat the oysters in their own liquor to boiling-point. Remove them from the fire after they have boiled one-half minute, skim them, and combine with the white sauce.
A two-line recipe that assumes you know what "medium white sauce" means and that you have a pint of shucked oysters in liquor. Both need a note.
- Medium white sauceBy the usual period convention that is 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon; thin sauce uses about 1 tablespoon of each, thick 3 to 4. Check the book's own sauce page for its exact proportions. Season with salt, white pepper and a little cayenne; nutmeg is often suggested with oysters.
- The half minute is not a typoThis is the one instruction that matters. Oysters firm up almost instantly and turn to rubber with any real cooking. Bring them just to the boil in their liquor, count thirty seconds, and take them off.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure, so a pint is 16 fluid ounces including the liquor. Small oysters will run to several dozen; check the tub size when buying, as modern tubs are not all a pint. Standards or selects will work but should be cut in half after heating.
- "Skim them"Heating the oysters throws up a grey foam along with bits of shell and grit. Skim it, and if the oysters were sandy, lift them out and strain the liquor through a fine sieve or cloth before it goes anywhere near the sauce.
- Use the liquorThe recipe does not say to add it, but the strained liquor is worth keeping. Stir a few tablespoons into the white sauce to thin and flavour it, then taste before adding salt — oyster liquor is already salty.
- Yield and servingSomething over a pint of finished sauce, enough for four to six. It was meant for boiled or baked white fish, and was also served with roast turkey.
- Holding itServe at once. Reheating the assembled sauce cooks the oysters a second time; if you must make the white sauce ahead, keep it warm over water and fold the oysters in at the table.
Oyster sauce here has nothing to do with the reduced, caramelised bottled condiment of Cantonese cooking — it is simply a white sauce carrying poached oysters, and it appears in this section because oysters were still cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans when the Butterick book was compiled. American cookbooks of the period treat them as a workaday ingredient rather than a luxury: they turn up in stuffings, patties, fritters, scallops and sauces, and oyster sauce with roast turkey is often said to have been common holiday practice in the eastern United States. The over-harvesting that made Chesapeake and New England oysters scarce and expensive was well under way by the time this was printed, which is why a pint of small oysters reads as an extravagance now and read as a Tuesday then.