Baked Oysters
Select large oysters and wash their shells thoroughly by scrubbing with a brush. Place the oysters in a baking pan in a very hot oven, bake until the shells open, remove the upper shells, add a little butter, salt and pepper to each oyster, and serve in the under shells.
ROAST OYSTERS (Fulton Market Style) - This is a famous New York way of serving oysters on the shell. For one person six oysters are usually served. Wash and dry them, place on a broiler, with the deep shell undermost, and roast in a moderate oven. They will be done two minutes after their shells open. Save the juice, keep it hot and serve in a cup with the oysters. Season with butter and pepper.
Two versions of the same idea: heat oysters until they gape, then eat them out of the deep half shell with butter. Almost everything depends on catching them the moment they open.
- The hinge: pull them the second they gapeAn oyster in the shell goes from plump to shrunken and leathery within a minute or two of opening. The second recipe's "two minutes after their shells open" is the outer limit, not a target. Check the pan constantly rather than setting a timer.
- "A very hot oven" and "a moderate oven"Very hot is generally taken as about 450-500F, moderate about 350F. The first method blasts them open fast; the Fulton Market version calls for gentler heat.
- Buying the oystersYou need live oysters in the shell, sold on ice, tightly closed or closing when tapped. Discard any that are gaping open and will not shut, and any with a cracked shell, before they go anywhere near the oven.
- Cup side downBoth methods depend on the deep half shell being underneath so the liquor stays in it. On a flat pan, steady them in a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil; the broiler rack in the second recipe does the same job.
- Ones that do not openA few will stay shut simply because the adductor muscle is stubborn, not because they are bad. Give them another minute, then discard rather than forcing them; there is no way to judge the ones that never cooperated.
- Opening and finishingProtect your hand with a folded towel, twist off the top shell with a knife, and cut the muscle free from the bottom shell so the oyster lifts cleanly with the fork. Butter, salt and pepper go on off the heat.
- The saved liquorTip the juice from the shells through a fine sieve as you work; there is grit in nearly every batch. Warmed and served in a cup alongside, as the second version directs, it is the whole point of the Fulton Market style.
- YieldSix oysters per person is the book's figure and reads as an appetizer portion. A dozen each makes it a light main course.
Fulton Market, on the East River in lower Manhattan, was the wholesale fish market that fed New York from the early nineteenth century onward, and its surrounding stalls and cellar saloons sold oysters by the plate to anyone passing. New York harbor and Long Island beds produced oysters in such volume through the 1800s that they were cheap street food as much as restaurant fare, which is why a book aimed at the ordinary household could treat them with something as unadorned as heat, butter and pepper. The market's name attached itself to this style of roasting on the shell, and the recipe itself calls it famous without troubling to explain it. By the time the Butterick book appeared, pollution and overharvesting were already closing the nearer beds, and the abundance the recipe assumes was beginning to end.