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Oyster Croustade
Beard and cut some oysters into halves and put in a stewpan with their strained liquor, one wineglassful of white wine, and a moderate quantity of gravy; season to taste with salt, pepper, and a small quantity each of grated lemon peel and pounded mace. Stew them gently, and when done place in them about one ounce of butter in small lumps. Cut off the tops of some small French rolls, scooping out the crumb, and put them into a stewpan of boiling butter, and fry until crisp and brown. Rub the crumbs of the rolls up finely and fry them also. Drain the rolls and fill them with the oyster mixture, placing on a hot dish with the crumbs around it, and serve.
A Gilded Age oyster stew served in a fried bread case. Everything here is straightforward except the timing, which the original leaves entirely to the cook.
- The hinge: do not stew the oysters"Stew them gently, and when done" means barely a minute or two, until the edges just ruffle and they plump. Oysters held longer than that shrink and turn to erasers. Bring the liquor, wine and gravy to a bare simmer first, reduce it to the consistency you want, then drop the oysters in at the end.
- BeardingTrimming off the tough dark frill (the gill fringe) around the edge of a shucked oyster. Shucked oysters sold in tubs are not usually bearded, though the frill on smaller ones is soft enough to ignore; pinch off anything stringy and cut only the large ones in half.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter of a cup. Some sources stretch it to 4 oz; 2 oz of dry white wine is right for a pound of oysters.
- "A moderate quantity of gravy"Not pan drippings in the modern sense but a light meat or veal stock, or a spoonful or two of reduced brown sauce. Use about 1/4 cup of good chicken or veal stock; the strained oyster liquor supplies most of the liquid and all of the salt, so season at the end.
- Pounded maceThe lacy aril around the nutmeg, sold ground today. Use a small pinch — it is assertive, and with the lemon peel it carries much of the flavour of the dish. Ground nutmeg can stand in, in the same amount or a little less.
- Butter at the finishThe ounce of butter dropped in "in small lumps" is a liaison, not a garnish. Take the pan off the heat and swirl it in so the sauce emulsifies rather than splits.
- The croustadesSmall crusty dinner rolls, tops cut off and the soft crumb hollowed out. Frying them in a stewpan of "boiling butter" scorches quickly; use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, at around 350F, and drain them upside down. Toasting brushed rolls at 400F until crisp is the tamer route.
- YieldAbout a pint of shucked oysters fills four small rolls — a first course for four, or a light supper for two.
A croustade is a crust — the word came into English through French, but is generally traced back through Provençal croustado and Italian crostata to Latin crusta — a hollowed and fried or baked bread case used to hold something saucy, and by the 1890s such cases were a common way of turning a stew into a plated course. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 volume, was assembling a compendium of what a well-run American kitchen was expected to produce, and oysters fill a startling number of its pages. New York in that decade still sat on enormous beds in the Hudson and Raritan estuaries; oysters were cheap enough for street stalls and grand enough for the Waldorf, and cookbooks of the period run to dozens of preparations — panned, scalloped, curried, in patties, in croustades. The wine, mace and lemon peel here follow English oyster cookery, which had been seasoning them that way since the eighteenth century. Within a generation pollution and overharvesting had closed most of the local beds, and oysters stopped being an everyday food in the city that had built itself on them.