Olive Sauce
This sauce is used for roast duck and other game. Two dozen olives; one pint of stock; one lemon; two tablespoons of salad oil; one tablespoon of flour; one slice of onion; salt and pepper. Place the olives in an earthenware bowl, pour over them enough hot water to cover and let them remain for half an hour to draw out the brine. Place the oil in a frying-pan, and add the onion; when this commences to color, add the flour. Stir until smooth; after it has cooked for two minutes, add the stock, and place in a gentle heat to simmer. Pare the olives round and round the same as though paring an apple, leaving the pulp in a single strip. If this is done carefully, the olives will retain their shape. Place the olives in the sauce, add the seasoning, and simmer for twenty minutes. Skim carefully, and serve. OYSTER SAUCE, No.1-Use one pint of small oysters; onethird cup of butter; three tablespoons of flour; one cup of milk; salt and pepper to taste. Heat the oysters in their own liquor to boiling point. Remove them from the fire after they have boiled one-half minute, skim them, and drain off the liquor into another stewpan. Rub the butter and the flour to a cream. Add the milk to the oyster liquor, and when heated to the boiling point, stir in the creamed butter and flour. Let the liquid boil up once, season with salt and pepper, add the oysters, and serve as soon as the latter are heated through.
OYSTER SAUCE, No. 2-Lay twenty-five medium-sized oysters in a hot saucepan, and move them about until they are plumped and curled. Remove them, and to the liquor which has exuded add enough sweet milk to make one pint of liquid. If milk is not abundant, the oyster liquor may be used wholly or in part. Mix two tablespoons of flour with a little milk, thicken the sauce, and let it boil for ten minutes, with proper stirring. Add one-half teaspoon of salt and one-half saltspoon of white pepper or nearly as much paprika; return the oysters to the pan, bring the sauce to a boil, remove from the fire, and stir in one or two spoons of butter. When this has melted and become thoroughly blended with the sauce, turn the latter over the dish, garnish with cress or parsley, and serve.
Three sauces run together here: a brown olive sauce for game, and two versions of oyster sauce. All are simple velouté-type sauces, but a few of the instructions need translating.
- The lemon is never usedOne lemon is listed in the olive sauce ingredients and appears nowhere in the method. The obvious reading is a squeeze of juice added at the end, off the heat, to sharpen the stock; a strip of pared zest simmered with the sauce is the other plausible intent.
- Draw the brine firstThis is the hinge of the olive sauce. Two dozen brine-cured olives dropped straight into a pint of stock can make it very salty. The half-hour hot-water soak is worth doing, and salt should only be judged after the olives have been in the pan.
- Paring the olivesCut around the stone in one continuous spiral with a small sharp knife, as you would peel an apple, then let the strip curl back into an olive shape in the sauce. Firm green olives work; soft black ones collapse. Pitted olives left whole are the practical substitute if you would rather not spiral two dozen.
- Salad oilIn American books of this period the term usually means a mild olive oil, sometimes cottonseed. Any neutral oil or olive oil works. One tablespoon of flour to a pint of stock gives a very thin, gravy-like sauce.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon of white pepper in Oyster Sauce No. 2 is an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Do not overcook the oystersOysters need only thirty seconds to a minute, just until the edges ruffle; anything longer and they tighten. In No. 1 the oysters go back in at the very end and are only heated through; in No. 2, where the sauce is brought back to a boil with the oysters in it, pull the pan as soon as it steams.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through a fine sieve or cloth before use; shell grit and sand are a common fault in these sauces.
- YieldEach sauce makes roughly a pint or a little more, enough for four to six servings alongside a roast bird or boiled fish. Oyster sauce of this type was a familiar accompaniment to boiled turkey and to cod.
Olive sauce belongs to the French repertoire of brown sauces for wildfowl — sauce aux olives, generally served with duck — and it calls for the fussy business of spiral-paring each olive to keep its shape. The oyster sauces tell a different story. Oysters were still cheap and abundant on both American coasts at the turn of the century, and a milk-thickened oyster sauce was a familiar partner to boiled turkey and to plain boiled fish. Two separate recipes appear, one enriched with a butter-and-flour kneading and one simply thickened with a flour slurry.