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Escalloped Oysters
Butter a baking-dish, then having ready a dish of bread crumbs, put first a layer of crumbs, then a layer of oysters, butter in little pieces, salt and pepper; repeat until the dish is full, being careful to have the crumbs on top, with small pieces of butter. Moisten with milk and a little of the oyster liquor. Bake until a good brown, in a hot oven and serve in the same dish.
A dish of proportions rather than measurements, which is how most scalloped-oyster recipes of the period read. The decisions left to the cook are how much liquid and how long to bake, and both matter.
- Hot ovenPeriod cookbooks generally meant something in the region of 400-450F, though this book gives no figures. At that sort of heat the crumb top browns before the oysters have time to shrink and toughen.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. A dish two or three layers deep is done in 20 to 25 minutes, as soon as the top is well browned and the edges bubble. Oysters cooked much beyond the point where their edges ruffle turn rubbery, and a longer bake will not improve anything.
- Only two layers of oystersSome period cookery writers cautioned that a third layer of oysters leaves the middle one raw and watery, though this recipe simply says to repeat until the dish is full. Crumbs, oysters, crumbs, oysters, crumbs is the safer build.
- How much milk"Moisten" is genuinely vague. Roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of milk plus a few tablespoons of strained oyster liquor for a 1 1/2-quart dish is enough to damp the crumbs without flooding them; the oysters themselves release a good deal of liquid as they heat.
- Drain and check the oystersUse about a pint of shucked oysters, drained, with their liquor strained through a fine sieve to catch shell fragments. Undrained oysters will make the crumbs sodden.
- Bread crumbs, not dry packaged crumbsThe period assumed crumbs torn or grated from stale bread, coarse and irregular. Fine commercial crumbs pack into a paste; cracker crumbs, the other common choice of the era, stay crisper still.
- ButterDotting the butter in small pieces on each layer is doing the work that melted butter tossed with the crumbs would do more evenly. Either approach works; count on 3 to 4 tablespoons in total.
- YieldA pint of oysters built this way serves four as a light main course or six as a side, and it is meant to go to the table in the baking dish.
Scalloped oysters belong to a period when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel, so that a dish like this could appear in a general household cookbook rather than a luxury menu. The name is usually traced to the shell: "scallop" is often said to have meant food baked and served in a scallop shell, and the spelling escallop preserves the older French-derived form that American cookbooks used interchangeably with "scallop" well into the twentieth century. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared, the shells had given way to a buttered baking dish, and the layered crumb-and-butter construction had become the standard American treatment for anything escalloped, from potatoes to veal. The dish is said to survive most visibly on New England and Midwestern holiday tables, where a version of these same instructions is reportedly still assembled every Thanksgiving.