Stewed Oysters
Drain a quart of oysters and put the liquor on the stove with a half teacup boiling water, a little salt and pepper and let boil up once. Then add the oysters, a piece of butter size of an egg, a half pint of boiling milk and let it come to a boil. Serve while hot and if too thin add a little flour for thickening. Serve cold slaw and crackers with this dish.
OYSTERS SAUTÉED-Drain the oysters well, season with salt and pepper and roll them in fine bread, or cracker crumbs. Place clear fat in a frying-pan and when it becomes very hot drop in enough oysters to cover the bottom of the pan. When one side is browned, turn the oysters carefully to brown the other side. The iron pan-cake griddle is often used for this purpose, as in this way many oysters may be cooked at one time. Serve very hot on toast.
Two oyster preparations from the same entry: a milk stew and a crumbed sauté. Both are quick, and both are ruined by the same mistake.
- The hinge: barely cook themOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes in the hot liquid. "Let it come to a boil" should mean the milk reaches a boil before the oysters go in, not that the oysters boil; held longer they shrink and turn rubbery.
- A quart of oystersThat is shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly two pounds all told, or somewhere between about 24 and 40 oysters depending on size. Ask the fishmonger for a container of shucked oysters in liquor rather than trying to shuck your way there.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor almost always carries grit and shell fragments. Pour it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before it goes on the stove, since this recipe uses the liquor as the whole base of the broth.
- Teacup, half pint, eggA period teacup runs about 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacup is about 3 fluid ounces, a generous 1/3 cup. A half pint of milk is 1 cup. Butter "size of an egg" is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Thickening at the endFlour tipped into hot liquid lumps. Work a tablespoon of flour into an equal weight of soft butter and whisk that paste in off the boil, or leave the stew thin as intended and let the crackers do the work.
- Clear fat for the saut","Clear fat" means rendered lard or drippings free of milk solids and water, chosen because it takes high heat without burning. Neutral oil or clarified butter does the same job; whole butter will scorch before the crumbs colour.
- Dry them firstDrained is not dry. Blot the oysters on a towel before crumbing, or the coating slides off and the fat spits.
- Cold slawThe period spelling of coleslaw, from the Dutch koolsla. It generally means shredded cabbage in a boiled or vinegar dressing, sharper and less sweet than modern mayonnaise slaw.
- YieldThe stew serves four generously as a supper dish, six as a first course.
Oyster stew belongs to a moment when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury. Through the nineteenth century the beds of Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound and the Gulf supplied American cities on such a scale that shucked oysters travelled inland by rail in tins and kegs, and oyster cellars and saloons were fixtures of ordinary streets. That abundance is why a household manual can open a recipe with "drain a quart of oysters" and assume no further comment. The milk stew, thickened lightly if at all and served with crackers, was standard cold-weather supper fare, and the pairing with slaw and crackers here marks it as a plain family meal rather than a dinner course. Overfishing and pollution thinned the beds badly by the early twentieth century, which is the main reason the same quart now costs what it does.