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CREAMED OYSTERS (Twenty-five oysters one pint)
Twenty-five oysters; one pint of cream or rich milk; one tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of flour; salt and pepper to taste. Boil the oysters in their own liquor and then drain. Heat the cream until it boils, add the flour and butter rubbed together, and stir until the mixture thickens. Then add the seasoning, next the oysters, and serve.
A plain white sauce built on cream rather than milk, with the oysters cooked separately so their liquor does not thin it. The whole thing takes under fifteen minutes once the oysters are shucked.
- Stop the oysters the moment they curl"Boil the oysters in their own liquor" means bring them barely to a simmer and pull them off as soon as the edges ruffle, about one to two minutes. Held at a boil they tighten into rubber and weep liquid into the finished sauce.
- Twenty-five oystersPeriod recipes commonly count oysters rather than weigh them. Twenty-five medium Eastern oysters comes to roughly a pint of shucked meats with their liquor, so a pint of shucked oysters can stand in.
- Save the liquorThe recipe drains it away, but the drained liquor is the most flavourful thing in the pan. Reducing a few tablespoons of it into the sauce, or simply loosening the sauce with it, costs nothing and improves the dish considerably.
- The thickening is deliberately lightOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of cream gives a very thin sauce by modern standards. Rubbing them together raw (a beurre manié) rather than cooking a roux is correct here; whisk it into the boiling cream in small pieces and let it bubble a minute to lose the raw flour taste.
- Cream or rich milk"rich milk" in this period meant whole, unskimmed milk with the cream still in it. Use half-and-half, or whole milk with a splash of heavy cream; skimmed milk will not carry the sauce.
- SeasoningOyster liquor is salty, so season at the end as directed and taste first. White pepper keeps the sauce clean-looking; cayenne and mace turn up alongside oysters in other recipes of the period, though this one calls only for salt and pepper.
- Yield and servingServes four as a first course, two or three as a supper dish. The recipe says only "serve"; creamed oysters of this kind were commonly spooned over toast points, into puff-pastry patty shells, or into ramekins with buttered crumbs browned on top.
Creamed oysters belong to the brief American moment when oysters were both cheap and everywhere. Through the nineteenth century the beds of Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound supplied a national trade, and rail cars packed with ice carried shucked oysters by the gallon far inland. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company that published The Delineator, and its fish chapter reflects that inland reach, with oyster recipes running to variations on stewing, frying or creaming. The dish itself is a white sauce of a sort widely taught in the period, and the treatment here is typical of the era's preference for cooking the shellfish apart and folding it in at the last moment. Overfishing and pollution had already begun to shrink the great beds by the time this book appeared, and oysters would never again be quite the everyday food they are in these pages.