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Oysters with Cream
Put a pint of cream in a saucepan with a small piece of onion and a little mace tied up in a muslin bag. Boil and stir in a tablespoonful of flour mixed with a little milk or cream. Put one quart of oysters in a saucepan with their liquor and boil them for a few minutes until tender, skimming frequently. Remove the oysters, drain, put them in the saucepan with the cream, remove the onion and mace, pour it into a dish and serve hot.
A creamed oyster dish of the sort that ran through Waldorf suppers and hotel breakfasts alike. The whole thing hangs on how briefly the oysters meet the heat.
- Cook the oysters barely at all"Boil them for a few minutes" is the one line to disregard. Shucked oysters are done when their edges ruffle, roughly 1-2 minutes in their own liquor at a bare simmer; beyond that they tighten and turn rubbery. Pull them the moment they plump.
- QuantitiesA pint of cream is 2 cups. A quart of shucked oysters is about 2 lb of meats with their liquor; the count varies widely with size and grade, anywhere from roughly two to five dozen. As written it will serve about 6 as a first course, 4 as a supper dish.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or as "blades." Blade mace is what the recipe means by something to tie in a bag; a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace stirred in gives a similar effect but cannot be fished out again.
- The muslin bagA tea ball, a coffee filter tied with string, or a square of cheesecloth all work. The point is that the onion and mace flavor the cream and then leave without trace.
- ThickeningA tablespoon of flour to a pint of cream is a very light bind, enough to coat rather than to make a sauce that stands up. Slake it smooth in cold milk before it goes into hot cream, and let the cream simmer two or three minutes afterward to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The oyster liquorThe recipe discards it with the draining. Strain that liquor and reduce it by half, then whisk it into the cream, and the dish gains the sea flavor it otherwise loses. Skim the gray foam off as the original instructs.
- ServingNothing here holds. Have toast points, puff pastry shells, or plain crackers ready before the oysters go into the cream, and take the pan to the table.
Creamed oysters belong to the long American stretch, roughly 1830 to 1920, when oysters were cheap protein rather than luxury: New York harbor beds and Chesapeake dredges shipped them by the barrel and the can, and hotel kitchens served them raw, fried, scalloped, panned, in stews and in patty shells. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated ma re d'h el, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compilation of recipes, and dishes like this one show the house style plainly - a short list of good ingredients, cream infused with onion and mace rather than seasoned aggressively, and no garnish to speak of. Mace was a common spice for oysters and other shellfish in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, gentler and less resinous than nutmeg; its near-disappearance from home spice racks is one of the clearer markers of how far the period's palate sits from ours. The Waldorf's oyster supply, like the city's, thinned in the following decades as pollution and overfishing closed the nearby beds.