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Fried Truffled Oysters
Chop six ounces of the cooked breast of a fowl and three ounces of raw fat salt pork, put this into a mortar with a little pepper and pound it. Chop a few truffles the size of peas and mix in. Put four dozen oysters on a cloth and with a sharp knife inserted at the edge of one of them make an opening up and down inside, but not to make the hole too large and fill them with the mixture. Put them when all done into a basin of flour, coat them well over, dip them into well-beaten egg, plunge them into a fryingpan of boiling fat and fry to a light golden color. Remove, drain on a cloth in a slow oven, sprinkle over with salt, arrange them on pieces of toast on a dish and serve.
A late-Victorian hotel canapé: shucked oysters stuffed with a truffled chicken-and-pork forcemeat, breaded and deep-fried. The whole thing hinges on the oysters being large and firm enough to hold a filling.
- Buy the right oystersYou need big, plump shucked oysters — select or counts, not standards or the small West Coast varieties. A slit cut along the edge of a limp oyster simply tears. Chill them well before stuffing; cold oysters are firmer and easier to handle.
- The forcemeatSix ounces of cooked chicken breast to three ounces of raw fat salt pork gives a fairly lean pounded forcemeat, the pork supplying fat and cured savour. A food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar was for; pulse, do not puree, or the mixture turns pasty and will not hold at the edge of the cut.
- Salt porkSalt pork varies a good deal in cure strength, so rinse and pat it dry, and add no salt to the forcemeat — the seasoning comes from the pork and the sprinkle at the end.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle at pea size is the intent. Preserved truffle peelings or a good truffle paste stand in reasonably; truffle oil does not, as it flattens out under frying heat.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means 350–375F. Below that the coating soaks; above it the crust colours before the raw pork fat in the centre has cooked through. Fry in small batches of six or eight so the oil does not crash.
- Cook the filling throughBecause the stuffing contains raw pork, these need long enough for the centre to cook — figure two to three minutes at 350F for a large stuffed oyster, and cut one open from the first batch to check that the forcemeat is set and opaque rather than glossy and soft.
- "A slow oven"About 300F, used here only to hold and drain the fried oysters while the rest come out of the fat. Ten minutes is fine; longer and the oysters tighten.
- YieldFour dozen serves eight as a first course, or twelve to sixteen passed as hors d'oeuvre. Cut the toast into rounds or fingers slightly smaller than each oyster.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, lent his name to an 1896 Cook Book compiled from existing culinary sources as much as from the hotel itself, and this dish shows the house style plainly: an ordinary American ingredient dressed in French technique. Oysters were still cheap and enormous in the 1890s New York market — sold by the hundred and eaten at every level of society — while truffles and a pounded chicken forcemeat were the vocabulary of the Escoffier-era restaurant kitchen. Stuffing a shellfish with godiveau and frying it is the sort of labour only a brigade could absorb, and the recipe's casual "four dozen" suggests a scale well beyond what a household might attempt. Fried oysters in some form were already thoroughly American; the truffle is what made this one hotel food.