Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Steamed Oysters
Steamed Oysters
Open and drain the required quantity of oysters, lay them in a steamer, which place over a saucepan of boiling water, cover them with a plate and cook for ten minutes. When ready place the oysters in a very hot dish, garnish with some croutons of brown bread fried in butter and drained and a few drops of lemon or vinegar poured over them. Dust lightly with salt and pepper and serve.
A plain shucked-oyster dish that needs almost nothing but restraint. The original timing is the one thing to change.
- Ten minutes is far too longShucked oysters over boiling water are done in two to three minutes, as soon as the edges ruffle and the flesh firms slightly. Ten minutes shrinks them to rubber and drives off the liquor that makes the dish worth eating.
- Don't discard the liquorThe direction to drain may be no more than a way of keeping the steamer from flooding; the text does not say. Either way the liquor is worth keeping: strain it, warm it, and spoon a little over the oysters in place of some of the lemon.
- The steamerAny perforated insert or folding steamer basket that sits above the water works. The plate laid over the oysters is there to trap steam close to them; a tight lid on the pan does the same job.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon six to eight oysters per person as a first course, twelve as a light supper dish.
- Croutons of brown breadBrown bread here most likely means a wholemeal or wheatmeal loaf rather than the molasses-sweetened Boston kind, though the recipe does not specify. Cut small dice, fry in butter until crisp, and drain on paper so they stay dry against the oyster juices.
- A very hot dishWarm the serving dish in a 200F oven while the oysters steam. Oysters this lightly cooked lose their heat within a minute on cold china.
- Seasoning lastSalt after cooking, not before. Oysters carry their own salt and the amount varies enough between beds that seasoning blind will overshoot.
- BuyingUse oysters in the shell from a supplier who can tell you the harvest date, and shuck them yourself. Pre-shucked tub oysters have usually lost the liquor and much of the texture this dish depends on.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) came out of a New York in which oysters were still cheap, ubiquitous and local: the beds of the lower Hudson and Long Island Sound supplied street stalls, saloon free lunches and the Waldorf's dining room alike, and a menu of the period might offer them raw, fried, broiled, stewed, panned, scalloped and steamed. Steaming was the gentlest of those treatments and the one that showed off freshness rather than disguising it, which is why the recipe carries so little seasoning and no sauce beyond acid and butter-fried bread. The fashion faded with the beds themselves; pollution and overharvesting had closed most of the New York City oyster grounds by the 1920s, and the shellfish that had been a working-class staple in Oscar's day became a delicacy within a generation.