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Fried Oyster Patties
Make some good puff paste, roll it out rather thin and cut it into round pieces. Chop some oysters, mix them with some chopped hard boiled egg, a little chopped parsley and a little grated lemon peel; add a seasoning of pepper, salt and a little pounded mace, moisten the mixture with cream and a little oyster liquor, then put a good spoonful on each piece of paste, fold it over, moisten the edges with a little cream and press them together. Brush the patties over with the yolk of an egg and fry them for fifteen minutes.
A late-Victorian hotel savoury: chopped raw oysters sealed in puff paste and deep fried. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what temperature the fat should be and how big a patty ought to be, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longPuff paste turnovers of this size colour and cook through in roughly three to four minutes in fat at 360-375F, turning once. Fifteen minutes gives you scorched pastry and oysters boiled to rubber inside their own steam. The original figure probably reflects a kettle of fat kept much cooler than we would now use.
- Fat and its temperatureThe kitchen of the 1890s is likely to have used lard or beef fat in a deep kettle. Any neutral oil at 365F works; without a thermometer, a cube of bread should brown in about a minute at that heat. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Size and yield"Round pieces" is unspecified. Cut 3 1/2 to 4 inch rounds, use about a tablespoon of filling, and expect a dozen to fourteen patties from a pound of puff paste.
- Sealing matters more than anythingA patty that opens in the fat empties its filling and spits. Moisten the edge, press firmly, then crimp with a fork and chill the filled patties for 20 minutes before frying so the butter in the paste is firm.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today ready-ground. A pinch is genuinely "a little" wo mit reads as warm and slightly peppery, and too much turns the oysters medicinal. Ground nutmeg at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- Oyster liquorThe liquid in the shells, or the packing liquid from a tub of shucked oysters. Use only a spoonful or two; a wet filling will steam the pastry apart. Drain the chopped oysters well before mixing.
- The egg washThe recipe directs brushing with yolk, which does little in hot fat beyond risking a patchy, speckled surface. It can be omitted with no loss. If you want the gloss, baking is an alternative the original does not offer.
- The oysters go in rawThey cook in the frying, and they cook fast wo mchopping them fine means they are done by the time the pastry is golden. Use oysters you would be happy to eat lightly cooked, and keep them cold until they go into the paste.
Oscar Tschirky was not a chef but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 Cook Book is a compendium of what a great American hotel kitchen of the 1890s was expected to produce — much of it lifted straight from the English and French domestic tradition. Oyster patties were a fixture of that tradition: oysters were still cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast, and small hot pastries were the standard way to open a dinner or fill out a supper table. The seasoning here — mace, lemon peel, hard-boiled egg, parsley — owes much to the English cookery-book manner, though it is not a close match for the oyster patties of Eliza Acton or Mrs. Beeton a generation earlier; another difference is that those are usually baked in patty-pans, while Oscar's are folded turnovers dropped into deep fat, a shape better suited to volume service. Pollution and overharvesting later made New York oysters scarce and expensive.