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Oyster Sauce for Boiled Poultry
Place in a saucepan over the fire a small quantity of flour with an equal amount of butter and stir together until it bubbles, then gradually mix in the liquor from the oysters and enough broth from the poultry to make a sauce of the consistency of cream Season with salt and white pepper and let it boil for a moment, then put the saucepan containing the sauce into a pan of hot water and place it on the back of the fire to keep hot until wanted. Put in the oysters and boil them once more. In the meantime dish the poultry, pour a little of the oyster sauce over it, and serve the remainder of the sauce in a boat.
A velouté thickened with the oysters' own liquor, held in a water bath until the bird is carved. The original gives no quantities at all, so the ratios below are the standard ones for a sauce of pouring-cream consistency.
- The hinge: the oysters go in last, briefly"Boil them once more" means bring the sauce back to a bare simmer with the oysters in it and pull it off as soon as their edges ruffle — roughly a minute. Held at a rolling boil they tighten into rubber and weep liquid that thins the sauce.
- Quantities to work fromFor about a pint of finished sauce, 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then a cup of strained oyster liquor and a cup of poultry broth whisked in gradually. A pint of shucked oysters (roughly 24 small ones) is right for a boiled chicken serving six.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor often carries shell grit and sand. Pour it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before it goes into the roux, or the sauce will be gritty — the grit is far easier to catch now than after the sauce is built.
- "Until it bubbles"This is a white roux — cook the butter and flour together two or three minutes over medium heat, just past the raw-flour smell, without letting it colour. Browning would muddy both the flavour and the pale look the dish wants.
- "The back of the fire" and the pan of hot waterOn a coal range the hottest spot was over the firebox; the back was the warm holding zone. In a modern kitchen, set the saucepan in a wider pan of hot (not simmering) water on the lowest burner, or use a double boiler. Direct low heat will scorch a flour-thickened sauce during a long hold.
- White pepper is deliberateBlack pepper specks show badly in an ivory sauce over boiled fowl. Season lightly at first: oyster liquor and poultry broth are both salty, and the sauce concentrates as it stands.
- Broth from the poultryThe recipe assumes a bird poached in seasoned water, giving you hot, well-flavoured cooking liquid to hand. If you are working from a roast bird instead, use a good unsalted chicken stock and expect to season a little harder.
- ServingA boat of sauce alongside is not optional here — the small amount poured over the bird is for appearance, and most of the oysters should reach the table in the boat, still hot.
Oysters with boiled fowl was a fixture of American and English tables through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by the barrel; a boiled turkey with oyster sauce was standard holiday fare in households that would not have thought of oysters as a luxury. The instruction to keep it "on the back of the fire" dates the text as clearly as any ingredient: it belongs to the coal range, where a cook managed temperature by moving the pan rather than turning a dial. The decline of the great East Coast oyster beds in the following decades is part of what turned this from an everyday sauce into an occasional one.