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Little Pigs in Blankets
Season large oysters with salt and pepper; cut fat bacon in very thin slices; wrap one oyster in each slice and fasten with toothpicks; heat frying-pan and put in the little pigs; cook just long enough to crisp the bacon, about five minutes; place on slices of toast, cut small, and serve immediately garnished with parsley.
A brief, forgiving dish: the only real variables are the thickness of the bacon and how long it sits in the pan. Everything else is assembly.
- Bacon thickness is the hingeUse the thinnest bacon you can buy, or ask for it sliced thin at a counter. Thick-cut bacon needs far longer to crisp than an oyster needs to cook, and by the time the fat renders the oyster inside has shrunk and toughened.
- Five minutes is the outer limitOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle. Keep the pan at a lively medium-high, turn the parcels once or twice, and pull them as soon as the bacon colours — three to five minutes total in a hot pan is right.
- Drain the oystersShucked oysters carry a good deal of liquor. Pat them dry before seasoning or the bacon will steam rather than crisp, and the pan will spit.
- ToothpicksWooden cocktail picks work as the original intends; soak them briefly if you plan to finish the parcels under a broiler. Remove them before serving, or warn whoever is eating.
- "Large oysters"The book gives no definition of size. Take it to mean the larger shucked oysters sold by the pint; small oysters disappear inside the bacon entirely.
- Broiling insteadA hot broiler, or a 425F oven on a rack over a sheet pan, gives more even crisping than a frying-pan and lets you cook a larger batch at once. The recipe itself specifies a frying-pan and gives no quantity.
- YieldFigure three to four parcels per person as a first course. A pint of shucked oysters of the size called for gives roughly sixteen to twenty, enough for five or six as a passed hors d'oeuvre. The recipe gives no yield of its own.
- The toastCut rounds or small squares from firm white bread and toast them dry and hard. Soft toast collapses under the rendered bacon fat before the plate reaches the table.
The name is period humour -- small parcels tucked up in a wrapper -- though the origin of the phrase is not documented. In late nineteenth-century American cookbooks "pigs in blankets" often meant an oyster wrapped in bacon rather than a sausage in pastry; the sausage sense became dominant later. A closely similar dish appears under the name "angels on horseback." The dish belongs to the years when oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten in great quantity in the eastern United States, before the beds were depleted.