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CREAMED OYSTERS (Cook one tablespoon of butter)
Cook one tablespoon of butter and one of flour in the blazer until they bubble. Add gradually one cup of rich milk or cream and stir until it forms a thick, creamy sauce. Add to this one pint of oysters and season with pepper and salt. Two tablespoons of sherry and the beaten yolks of two eggs will change this into "Oysters à la Newburg."
Note: The above cream sauce or "white sauce" may serve for innumerable dishes of fish, fowl and vegetables.
OYSTERS À L'INDIENNE-Drain and wipe dry large oysters and wrap each in a slice of bacon, fastened with a wooden toothpick; stick two cloves in each oyster. Mix two tablespoons of Chutney sauce; two of worcestershire sauce; one tablespoon of minced parsley; six olives cut fine and a half teaspoon of
A chafing-dish white sauce with oysters folded in, plus a one-line conversion to Newburg. The whole thing takes under ten minutes once the sauce is made.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the water pan goes beneath it for gentle holding. Any small heavy saucepan or a skillet does the same job on a burner set low.
- Oyster timingThis is the hinge. A pint of shucked oysters needs two to three minutes in the hot sauce, only until the edges ruffle and the bodies plump. Held longer they tighten into rubber and weep liquor that thins the sauce.
- A pint of oystersSold today as a 16-oz container of shucked oysters in their liquor, roughly 16 to 24 medium ones. Drain them and reserve the liquor; a spoonful or two stirred into the sauce is worth more than the cream.
- Rich milkIn 1911 this meant unhomogenised whole milk with the cream still on it. Whole milk works; half-and-half is closer to what was intended.
- Making it NewburgBeat the yolks with a little of the hot sauce first, then stir the mixture back in off the flame. Above roughly 180F the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks. The sherry goes in at the same point so it does not cook away.
- SeasoningOysters carry their own salt, so season after the oysters have gone in, not before. Cayenne turns up in many period Newburg recipes, and nutmeg in some, if you want to push it that way.
- YieldServes two as a supper dish over toast points, or four as a first course.
- The truncated second recipeThe Oysters a l'Indienne text breaks off mid-sentence in the original page and gives no cooking method or time. Treat it as a fragment rather than a working recipe.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911 from the pattern company's publishing arm, and its chafing-dish chapter belongs to a genuine fad: from the 1890s into the 1910s the spirit-lamp chafing dish was the fashionable way to feed people after the theatre or at a bachelor supper, cooking at the table without troubling a servant. Oysters suited it perfectly, being cheap, plentiful along the American coast, and ruined by long cooking anyway. The Newburg variation given here in a single sentence is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s and to a sea captain named Ben Wenberg, whose name is said to have been scrambled to Newburg after a falling-out with the restaurant -- a good story, and one repeated in print for well over a century, though the documentary trail is thin. That a mass-market pattern book could dispose of it in one line shows how thoroughly the dish had escaped the restaurant by 1911.