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Oyster Pie
Line a pie dish with puff paste, and fill it with slices of stale bread; butter the paste that covers the edge of the dish, lay a cover of puff paste over the pie, press the edges very lightly together, trim them, and bake quickly in a hot oven. Mean while drain the liquor from one quart of oysters and chop them fine with a sharp, thin bladed knife. Blend a teaspoonful of corn starch in a very little cold milk, pour over it one-half pint of boiling milk or cream, put it over the fire in a saucepan, stir till it thickens, and then add one ounce of butter; when the butter has been well mixed in, season the chopped oysters with salt and pepper, stir them into the thickened milk, let simmer (stirring all the time), for five minutes, and then take from off the fire. When the bread pie is baked remove from the oven, and while still hot carefully take off the upper crust; remove the bread, and fill the dish with the thickened cream or milk and chopped oysters, replace the top crust, put the pie again in the oven till it is thoroughly hot and then serve.
A blind-baked puff paste shell filled after the fact, which is the whole trick here — the pastry and the oysters are cooked separately so neither suffers. A few conversions and one timing worth arguing with.
- The stale bread is a baking weightSliced stale bread fills the shell so the paste holds its shape and the lid does not collapse; it is discarded, not eaten. Pie weights or dried beans on parchment do the same job, though bread has the advantage of supporting a full lid as well as the base.
- "A hot oven"425–450°F. Puff paste needs that heat for the layers to lift before the butter renders out; a moderate oven gives a greasy, flat crust.
- A quart of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, around 2 lb in the tub and rather less once drained. Counts vary a great deal with grade, so buy them by volume rather than trying to work back from numbers or shell counts.
- Half a pint, one ounceHalf a pint of milk or cream is one cup; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons. A single teaspoon of cornstarch to a cup of liquid gives a loose, pourable sauce rather than a thick one, which suits a filling the oysters will thin further as they cook.
- Do not waste the liquorThe recipe drains the oysters and says nothing further about the liquid. Strain it and reduce a few spoonfuls into the sauce, or the filling will taste of cream and little else.
- Five minutes is longWhole oysters at five minutes go rubbery. Finely chopped ones are more forgiving, but two to three minutes over gentle heat is enough — they are done the moment the edges firm and the sauce turns opaque.
- The reheatReturn the assembled pie only until the filling is hot through, five to eight minutes at the same heat. Longer and the sauce breaks and the bottom crust softens.
- YieldServes four to six as a course. The recipe does not specify a dish size; a standard 9-inch pie dish suits these quantities.
Oyster pie belongs to a period when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury -- through the nineteenth century the beds of Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound supplied American cities in enormous volume, and oyster cellars, stews and pies were everyday eating. The construction here is unusual: rather than baking oysters inside the crust, where they overcook while the pastry sets, an empty lidded shell is baked against a bread filler and married to a separately made sauce at the last moment. That would suit a kitchen finishing dishes to order, since shells could be baked ahead -- though the recipe itself says nothing about why it is built this way. The Waldorf opened in 1893, and Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name the 1896 Cook Book carries, was working at a moment when oysters commonly opened formal American menus. The decline of the eastern beds from overfishing and pollution in the following decades is why a quart of chopped oysters no longer reads as an economical supper.