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Oyster Bouchees
Blanch two dozen oysters and turn ten mushrooms, cut both into small pieces, put them into a saucepan with some white sauce and stir over the fire till hot. Prepare some puff paste, giving it six turns, roll it out to about one-fourth inch in thickness, and with a fluted tin cutter, about two inches in diameter, cut eighteen rounds out of the paste. Arrange the pieces of paste on a baking sheet, let them rest on ice for ten minutes, then brush over with beaten egg, and with a plain tin cutter one and one-fourth inches in diameter cut through the center of each bouchee to about one-third of the thickness of the paste. Bake the bouchees in a quick oven, and when cooked lift off the inner circle of the paste and hollow them out inside. Fill the bouchees with the salpicon of oysters and mushrooms and replace the covers. Place a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper on a hot dish, arrange the bouchees on it, garnish with fried parsley and serve.
A canapé course from the Waldorf's kitchen, built on two skills the modern cook is likeliest to shortcut: a proper puff paste and a very brief oyster blanch. Read the oyster note first.
- Blanch means seconds, not minutesOysters need only to be brought to the point where their edges ruffle — 30 seconds to a minute in their own liquor or barely simmering water. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber, and they still have the sauce and the oven-warm shell ahead of them.
- "Turn ten mushrooms"Turning is the old knife exercise of paring a mushroom cap into shallow spiral flutes. Since these are then cut into small pieces for the filling, the flutes serve no purpose here; trim and quarter them instead, and cook off their water before they go into the sauce.
- White sauceA béchamel, on the thick side — roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 of flour to a cup of milk, or milk cut with the strained oyster liquor. It has to be stiff enough to sit in a pastry case without running out the sides.
- SalpiconThe word for any mixture of small uniform dice bound in sauce. Cut the oysters and mushrooms to about the same size so the filling spoons evenly into an inch-wide cavity.
- Six turns of pasteSix folds is standard full puff paste; store-bought all-butter puff is an honest substitute. Keep everything cold, and give the rolled sheet a rest in the freezer rather than "on ice" — ten minutes is enough to set the butter before it goes in the oven.
- A quick oven425–450F. Puff needs the high initial heat to lift; drop to 375F once the cases are risen and coloured if they threaten to scorch before the centres dry out.
- Cutting the lidsScore the inner circle only a third of the way down, and press the cutter straight without twisting — a twist seals the layers and kills the rise on that edge. Egg wash the tops only, never the cut sides.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into 350F fat for about 20 seconds, until they stop hissing, then drained on paper. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- Yield and timingEighteen bouchees, enough for six as a first course or a small tray of hors d'oeuvre. Bake, hollow and fill as close to serving as possible; a filled case soon softens.
Bouchee means "mouthful" in French, and the case is essentially a vol-au-vent shrunk to canape scale — the same technique of scoring a lid into rolled puff paste, baking it, and lifting out the crumb to leave a shell. Small, labour-heavy French service of this kind suited a large New York hotel kitchen with the staff to turn mushrooms by hand, and oysters were far more of an everyday commodity in the nineteenth-century city than they are now, which may be why they appear here in a two-bite pastry rather than as the centre of a dish. The folded napkin under the bouchees is period plating, and the recipe offers an ornamental dish-paper as the alternative.