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Oyster Sauce
Partially boil the oysters in their own liquor, then strain and beard them, reserving the liquor. Put one ounce of butter in a stewpan with a tablespoonful of flour, stir over the fire until mixed, then pour in the oyster liquor and stir until boiling. Add as much milk as will be required to make the sauce, also a blade of mace and a bay leaf tied together, pepper and salt to taste, add a small quantity of cayenne pepper. Boil the sauce for a few minutes, then put in the oysters. When they are quite hot remove the mace and bay leaf, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and serve.
A flour-and-butter velouté built on oyster liquor, thinned with milk. The whole thing hinges on how little the oysters are cooked: they go in twice, briefly, and any real boiling turns them to erasers.
- "Partially boil" means secondsBring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, roughly 30 to 60 seconds, then lift them out. They finish in the hot sauce at the end, where they need a minute at most, and the sauce should not return to a boil once they are in.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilly gill and the tough bit of muscle at the hinge. Pinch it away with the fingers or snip it with scissors. Shucked oysters may or may not come trimmed, so check and remove any beard yourself.
- Strain the liquor twiceOyster liquor carries shell grit and sand. Pass it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before it goes into the roux, or the finished sauce will be gritty and nothing can be done about it.
- QuantitiesAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; with a tablespoon of flour that gives a light roux. The recipe fixes no volumes: the liquor is whatever the oysters yield, and the milk is added, as it says, in whatever quantity is needed for the consistency you want. Cook the flour and butter a minute or two before adding liquid so it does not taste raw.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece. If you cannot find whole mace, a small pinch of ground mace or grated nutmeg added with the milk does the job, though it cannot be fished out later.
- Lemon last, off the heatAcid added to a hot milk-based sauce can curdle it. Pull the pan from the burner, then squeeze in the juice and swirl it through just before serving.
- What it is forThis is a sauce for boiled or baked fish, particularly cod and haddock, and traditionally for boiled turkey. Make it at the last moment; held over heat it thickens and the oysters toughen.
Oyster sauce in this English sense has nothing to do with the fermented Cantonese condiment of the same name; it is a white sauce enriched with the mollusc itself, and it was a fixture of nineteenth-century British and American tables, above all with boiled cod and with boiled turkey at Christmas. Its ubiquity reflects how cheap oysters were: the beds of the Atlantic coast supplied them by the barrel, and they turned up in soups, stuffings, patties and sauces rather than being treated as a luxury. Oscar Tschirky's book, generally associated with the Waldorf kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, sets out the familiar French method - roux, liquor, milk, an aromatic bundle of mace and bay drawn out before serving - in terse terms. In time, pressures that are usually said to have included overfishing, disease and pollution thinned the great American oyster beds, and sauces like this one moved from everyday cookery to the occasional table.