Oyster Pie
Butter a deep pie-plate and line it with paste.
Roll out more paste for the top or cover. Fold a clean towel and place in the pie-dish to support the cover and add the latter. Bake well, take off the cover and remove the towel. The top crust may be baked on another pie-plate if preferred. Have prepared sufficient oysters, taking care that there are no bits of shells among them. Drain off the liquor; put it in an ordinary pan or basin and the oysters in a saucepan with just enough of the liquor to keep them from burning; also salt, pepper and butter. Put in a little sweet cream or milk and simmer-not boil-to keep them plump. Fill the pie-dish with the fricassee, put on the cover and serve hot.
This is a filled pie rather than a baked one: crust and oysters are cooked separately and married at the last moment. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how briefly the oysters see heat.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersShucked oysters need only to heat through until their edges ruffle, roughly two to three minutes at a bare simmer. "Simmer-not boil" is the book's own warning, and it is the reason the recipe works; boiled oysters shrink hard and turn to erasers.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature, only "bake well," assuming you know your own range. On a modern range a blind-baked crust of this sort is usually taken hot, in the region of 400-425F, for something like 20-25 minutes, until the crust is set and coloured through.
- The folded towelAn old dodge for blind-baking a lid without a filling: the towel holds the top crust up and lets the bottom crust cook. Use a clean, undyed cotton or linen cloth, or do what the recipe offers as an alternative and bake the lid separately on another pie-plate. Pie weights over parchment do the same job for the base.
- How many oystersThe book says only "sufficient" and gives no plate size. A deep 9-inch plate will take roughly a quart of shucked oysters, about two pints, drained. Buy them in their liquor, not packed dry.
- Sweet creamSweet cream simply means fresh, unsoured cream, as against cream that had turned. Heavy or whipping cream is the equivalent; a few tablespoons is enough to bind the liquor without drowning it.
- The reserved liquorThe recipe sets most of the liquor aside in a basin and never says what to do with it. Reduce it briefly and add it back, or thicken it with a small butter-and-flour roux, otherwise the filling is thin and the bottom crust goes soft in minutes.
- Grit and shellThe instruction about shell fragments is not decorative. Tip the oysters into their own strained liquor, lift them out by hand, and pour the liquor through a fine sieve or coffee filter.
- Yield and timingA 9-inch pie serves four to six as a main course. Assemble at the table's edge and serve immediately; a filled oyster pie does not hold or reheat.
Oysters were cheap protein in American cities through the nineteenth century, dredged in great quantities from Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island beds and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, so that oyster pie belonged to everyday cooking rather than to the luxuries. The technique here, cooking the crust empty and the filling separately, has antecedents in the older English tradition of covered pies whose pastry served first as a vessel; the folded towel propping up the lid is a frugal workaround of the same kind. Oyster stocks along the Atlantic coast declined sharply from overfishing and pollution in the early twentieth century, and the abundance this recipe takes for granted is the single thing about it that has most changed.