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Oysters with Mushrooms
Drain two dozen oysters; put them in a hot pan. Cook in one teaspoon of butter until the edges begin to curl; then remove to a hot dish. Make a sauce by adding to the oyster liquor the juice from one-half pint of mushrooms, and enough milk to make a pint. Thicken this with one tablespoon of flour blended with one tablespoon of butter and cook two minutes. Add one-half cup of chopped mushrooms, one teaspoon of onion juice, one-half teaspoon of lemon juice and a little salt.
Beat the yolks of two eggs and stir in. Then add the oysters. Let the mixture come to a boil, and serve at once.
A creamed oyster dish that depends almost entirely on restraint: two short cookings, neither of which should go a moment long. The instruction to let it come to a boil after the yolks go in is the one line to ignore.
- Do not boil after the yolksEgg yolks set at around 160-165F and will curdle into grains if the sauce actually boils. Temper the beaten yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce, stir them back in off the heat, and hold the pan just below a simmer until it thickens.
- Cook the oysters barely at all"Until the edges begin to curl" is a genuine cue and it arrives in about a minute over good heat. Anything past that and they tighten and turn rubbery, and they get a second warming when they return to the sauce.
- Half a pint of mushroomsThe reference to their 'juice' points to canned mushrooms, which were sold in American groceries by this period, and the recipe uses both the packing liquid and the pieces. With fresh mushrooms there is no juice: sauté roughly 4 oz sliced, and make up the shortfall with milk or a little mushroom or chicken stock.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid in the container of shucked oysters. Strain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter first, since it usually carries shell grit.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without pieces: grate half a small onion on a fine rasp and squeeze, or press it through a garlic press. A teaspoon is roughly what half a small onion gives.
- The rouxOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of liquid makes a deliberately thin sauce, which is correct here; the yolks finish the thickening. Cook the flour and butter together a minute before the liquid goes in so it does not taste raw.
- Yield and servingTwo dozen oysters in a pint of sauce serves four as a first course, two as a supper dish. The recipe gives no serving vessel; dishes of this kind were often served over buttered toast, in pastry shells, or in scallop shells.
Creamed oysters in one form or another run through nearly every American cookbook of the late nineteenth century, and the Butterick book was issued by the pattern company as part of its line of household manuals for middle-class women. Oysters were then cheap and abundant on both coasts, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, and appeared far more casually than they do now. The canned mushrooms suggest the date: tinned French mushrooms became more widely available in American grocery stores in the closing decades of the 1800s, and recipes of the period use their packing liquid as a flavouring in its own right. The finish of egg yolks beaten into a thin white sauce is a common genteel enrichment of the era.