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Oyster Patties
Turn a couple of dozen oysters into a basin with their liquor. Put one ounce of butter into a saucepan and work it together with a tablespoonful of flour into a smooth paste; when warm add a little mace, cayenne, and salt, and pour in gradually three tablespoonfuls of cream. Boil for a few minutes and pour in the strained liquor from the oysters, add the oysters last, and boil for a couple of minutes longer. Line some small patty pans with some thin puff paste, put a quantity of rice in each to keep them in shape, cover the top with more of the paste and bake in a brisk oven. Take them out, remove the top, empty out the rice, fill them with the oysters and a little of the liquor, cover and serve.
A straightforward oyster fricassee in a blind-baked puff pastry shell. The one thing to watch is the oysters: two dozen small oysters cooked in a thin sauce want the shortest possible heat.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersAdd them at the very end and give them a minute or two at most, just until the edges ruffle. Oysters held longer in a boiling sauce tighten and turn rubbery, and they will shed water into the sauce as they do it.
- "A brisk oven"Conventionally read as roughly 400-450F. Puff paste needs high heat to lift and set before the butter melts out; the shells go in hot and come out when the sides are dry and firmly coloured, which for small shells is likely to be somewhere around 15-20 minutes.
- Quantities in modern termsOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons, which with a tablespoon of flour makes a roux for roughly a cup of liquid. Three tablespoons of cream plus the strained liquor from two dozen oysters gives a sauce on the thin side, which is what you want for filling pastry.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through a fine sieve or cloth; shell grit is common. If your oysters are shucked and packed, the liquor in the tub is fine, but taste it before adding all of it, as it can be considerably saltier than the liquor from oysters you open yourself.
- MaceGround mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg, and used here in a small pinch. Nutmeg is the nearest substitute, slightly sweeter and heavier; use less of it.
- Rice as pie weightsThe standard blind-baking method of the period. Line the pastry with a scrap of parchment first, or grains work into the raw paste and are a nuisance to pick out.
- Vessel"Small patty pans" are shallow individual tins, on the order of a modern muffin cup though usually shallower. Frozen puff pastry vol-au-vent cases will stand in for the pastry operation.
- YieldTwo dozen oysters and this much sauce fills about eight to ten small patties. Serve them the moment they are assembled, as the filling softens the pastry quickly.
Oyster patties belong to the long American run of oyster cookery that peaked in the second half of the nineteenth century, when New York harbour beds and the Chesapeake shipped oysters cheaply enough that they turned up in soups, stews, stuffings, pickles and pastry. The form itself is French in origin, a small bouchée or patty shell of puff paste filled with a creamed ragout, and it suited hotel kitchens because the shells could be baked in quantity in advance and filled to order: the recipe is built around the division between the morning's pastry work and the last two minutes before the plate goes out. By the 1920s many of the beds around New York had been badly depleted and closed to harvest over pollution, and oysters stopped being the everyday filler they are here.