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Baked Oysters with Spaghetti
One-fourth pound of spaghetti; twenty-five oysters; one pint of milk; two tablespoons of cornstarch; one-half tablespoon of butter; one cup of bread crumbs; salt and pepper. Break the spaghetti into small pieces, boil it in plenty of salted boiling water for one-half an hour or until it is quite tender, and then drain. Scald the oysters in their own liquor, and drain. Butter a baking-dish, put in a layer of the spaghetti and then a layer of the oysters, season with salt and pepper, and repeat the layers until all the material is used, finishing with a layer of spaghetti. Scald all the milk but a small quantity, which use to wet the cornstarch; then add the cornstarch to the milk, stir well, and when the liquid has thickened, add the butter. Pour this mixture over the layers in the dish, make a layer of the bread crumbs, and bake in a quick oven just long enough to brown the crumbs-about ten minutes.
A plain scalloped oyster casserole with spaghetti standing in for the usual cracker crumbs. Two of its timings belong to 1911 and should not be followed literally.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" in period usage is roughly 400-425F, though the term was never precise. The dish goes in only to brown the crumbs, so ten minutes at that heat is about right; everything in the dish is already cooked.
- Do not boil the spaghetti half an hourLong boils were the convention in period pasta cookery. Boil modern dried spaghetti to just short of al dente, around a minute less than the package says, since it will absorb sauce in the oven. Thirty minutes produces paste.
- Scalding the oystersThis is the hinge. Bring the oysters in their liquor just to the point where the edges ruffle, well under two minutes, then lift them out at once. Oysters held at a simmer tighten into rubber and no amount of baking will loosen them again.
- Save the liquorThe recipe drains the oyster liquor away and says nothing more about it. Strain it and use part of it in place of some of the milk; without it the cornstarch sauce is bland and the finished dish tastes of little but starch.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a fairly thick pouring sauce; cornstarch thickens more than the same measure of flour, so this is nearer a medium than a thin bechamel. Slake the cornstarch in cold milk, not warm, or it will lump, and let the sauce cook a full minute after it thickens to lose the raw starch flavour.
- Butter the crumbsThe half tablespoon of butter goes into the sauce, and apart from the butter used to grease the dish it is the only fat here. Toss the cup of bread crumbs with a tablespoon or two of melted butter, or they will scorch at the edges and stay pale and dusty in the middle.
- Twenty-five oystersShucked oysters vary by grade, running roughly 20 to 40 to the pint depending on size, so twenty-five sizeable oysters is about a pint with their liquor.
- YieldA quarter pound of spaghetti and about a pint of oysters is modest: two or three as a main course, four to six as a first course, in a dish of about a quart and a half.
Scalloped oysters — oysters layered with crumbs and milk and browned in the oven — were standard American cold-weather cooking through the nineteenth century, when barrelled oysters travelled inland by rail and were cheap enough to be an everyday food rather than a luxury. What dates this version is the spaghetti. In 1911, when the Butterick Publishing Company issued this book for its pattern-buying readership, Italian pasta was still handled as a plain starch on the model of macaroni: broken small, boiled long, and bound with a white sauce. The half-hour boil is the tell. The instruction to "scald the oysters in their own liquor" is older and sounder, a standard first step in oyster cookery of the period.