Oyster Stuffing
For an oyster stuffing, use a pint of oysters, and a cup of buttered bread crumbs, well seasoned. Each oyster must be rolled in crumbs separately in order to become thoroughly coated. Stuff the fish with the oysters and sprinkle the remainder of the crumbs over the oysters.
The sauces mentioned in the following fish recipes are to be found in the chapter on Sauces for Meats, Fish, Poultry and Game.
A short entry that assumes you already know how to bake a whole fish. The technique is sound, but a few things need spelling out for a modern cook buying oysters in a tub.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure: a pint is 16 fl oz, which depending on their size may be anywhere from about 15 to 30 oysters plus their liquor. Drain them well before crumbing, or the coating slides off and the stuffing turns to paste.
- Buttered bread crumbsNot dry packaged crumbs. Soft crumbs from day-old bread, tossed with melted butter until each crumb is coated — figure about 3 tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs. The recipe says only 'well seasoned', and it is the crumbs rather than the oysters that carry the seasoning: salt, pepper, and if you like a little lemon zest or mace.
- Why each oyster is rolled separatelyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Individually coated oysters stay whole and the crumbs absorb the liquor they throw off as they heat. Dumped in loose, the oysters weep and the stuffing collapses into a wet mass.
- How much fish it fillsA pint of oysters and a cup of crumbs will stuff a whole fish of roughly 3 to 4 lb. Fill loosely and skewer or tie the cavity closed.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no oven setting. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, works; allow roughly 12 to 15 minutes per pound for a stuffed fish and judge by the flesh rather than the clock. The oysters need only a few minutes at heat; the fish sets the time.
- Check the stuffing, not just the fishBecause the oysters sit in the coldest part of the fish, take the temperature at the centre of the stuffing and bring it to 165F. The flesh at the backbone should flake and the stuffing should be hot through, not merely warm.
- Buying oystersUse refrigerated shucked oysters within a day or two of purchase and smell them before crumbing — they should smell of clean seawater. Anything sour or sulfurous goes out.
Oyster stuffing reads as a luxury now, but in the period this book comes from it is often said to have been closer to thrift than to extravagance. Shucked oysters were shipped inland by rail in tin pails. Butterick, a pattern company that expanded into household manuals for its dressmaking readership, gives the entry in the compressed style of the whole fish chapter: the technique in three sentences, the sauces farmed out to another chapter. The trick of rolling each oyster separately in buttered crumbs solves a genuine problem, which is that oysters give up a great deal of water the moment they meet heat.