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Scalloped Oysters
Strain the oyster liquor, rinse the oysters in it, then plump and beard them. Measure the liquor and add to it an equal quantity of rich white sauce; if this does not thicken it sufficiently add one teaspoonful of flour, rubbed into a small piece of butter, stir over the fire until pretty hot, stir until it boils and boil ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Put in the oysters and keep them nearly simmering for three minutes, then put them into their shells with a little of the sauce, put a layer of sifted breadcrumbs on them, pour over this a little clarified butter and brown them in the oven.
A restaurant version of a dish that most American households made in a baking dish; Oscar returns it to the shell. The whole thing hinges on keeping the oysters out of the heat as much as possible.
- Plump and beardTo plump is to heat the oysters gently in their own strained liquor just until the edges ruffle, no more than a minute or two. The beard is the dark gill fringe along one side, trimmed off with scissors or a knife tip; shucked oysters sold today are not always trimmed, so check.
- Total cooking timeThe oysters get warmed in the liquor, held three minutes in the sauce, then browned in the oven. That is at the outer limit. Undershoot every stage rather than overshoot, or they will be firm and shrunken by the time the crumbs colour.
- Rich white sauceA béchamel made with cream or a heavy cream-enriched milk. Equal quantities means by volume: if you have a cup of strained liquor, use a cup of sauce. Reduce the liquor first if it seems thin.
- Boil ten minutesThis is to cook the raw taste out of the flour and reduce the sauce, not to cook the oysters, which are not in the pan yet. Stir the bottom of the pan or the dairy will catch.
- Beurre maniéThe teaspoonful of flour rubbed into butter is a thickener. Note that here it goes in before the long boil rather than at the very end; add it in small pinches and let the sauce come back to a boil before deciding whether more is needed.
- Clarified butterButter melted and the milk solids skimmed and poured off. It matters here because whole butter's water and solids would sog and scorch the crumbs rather than crisping them.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the dish only needs colour. A hot oven, 450F, for five to eight minutes, or a broiler watched constantly, browns the crumbs before the oysters overcook.
- The shellsDeep shells, scrubbed and steadied on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil so the sauce does not run out. A shallow gratin dish works if you have no shells; the timing is the same.
- YieldNot stated. A quart of shucked oysters, the number depending on their size, fills enough shells for four as a first course.
Scalloped oysters, older cookbooks spell it escalloped, were a fixture of nineteenth-century American cooking, when oysters were cheap urban food sold by the barrel and eaten by every class. The usual home version layered oysters and cracker or bread crumbs in a dish and baked them; Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and compiler of this 1896 book, does the restaurant thing of building a proper rich white sauce from the strained liquor and returning the oysters to the half shell for service. The word scallop here is generally said to refer to the shell shape and the browned crumb top rather than to the mollusc itself, though that derivation is traditional rather than settled. The recipe's insistence on straining and reusing the liquor reflects a period when the oyster's own brine was understood as the seasoning, and salt is nowhere mentioned in the instructions.