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Stewed Oysters
Open the shells of one dozen oysters, take them out carefully and wash them in their own liquor until perfectly free from grit and pieces of shell, put them in a saucepan, strain the liquor twice, pour it over, place the pan at the side of the fire and let it simmer gently for a few minutes until done. Remove the oysters with a skimmer and put them on a dish in a slow oven to keep warm; add to the liquor one teacupful of cream and salt and cayenne to taste. Place the pan on the fire and when the liquor boils add two ounces of butter worked up with one teaspoonful of flour and continue to stir till it is all thoroughly mixed. Put in the oysters to warm up without boiling, remove the pan from the fire and stir in a little lemon juice. Have ready some pieces of bread fried in butter, arrange them on a dish, put the oysters on them, pour over the liquor and serve very hot.
Stewed Oysters, Baltimore Style Open neatly three dozen medium sized fresh oysters, place them in a saucepan without their liquor, and add one ounce of good butter; cover the pan, place it over the fire and cook for two minutes, then add one wineglassful of good Madeira wine and a very little cayenne pepper, cook together for two minutes longer and add one gill each of Spanish sauce and half-glaze. Stir thoroughly until boiling, and just before serving squeeze in the juice of a lemon, add one-half ounce of butter, a teaspoonful of finely chopped parsley, and serve immediately in a hot tureen.
Two versions of the same dish, one plain and one enriched with Madeira and brown sauce. Both stand or fall on a single point: the oysters are barely cooked, and anything past the moment their edges ruffle turns them to rubber.
- The hinge: heat, do not boilOysters need roughly one to two minutes in liquid just below a simmer, until the edges curl and the flesh firms slightly. Oscar's "simmer gently for a few minutes" allows longer than that; pull them at the curl and they stay plump.
- Old measuresA gill in American usage is half a cup (4 fl oz); the imperial gill is 5 fl oz. A wineglassful is about 2 fl oz. A teacupful is not standardised but in American books of this era runs about 3/4 cup, or 6 fl oz.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the top plate. On a modern hob it is the lowest setting, or a heavy pan pulled half off the burner.
- Slow oven300F for holding the drained oysters warm. A warming drawer or a covered dish over hot water does the job with less risk of overcooking them a second time.
- Spanish sauce and half-glazeSpanish sauce is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce; half-glaze is demi-glace, espagnole reduced with stock. Both were standing preparations in a hotel kitchen. A good reduced brown veal stock, thickened lightly, substitutes for both at home.
- Butter worked up with flourThis is beurre maniut((about 4 tablespoons) kneaded with a teaspoon of flour, stirred into the boiling liquor to thicken it. The proportion is very buttery by modern standards and can be cut by half without harming the sauce.
- The oyster liquorStraining twice through a fine sieve or muslin is not fussiness; it is the difference between a clean sauce and a gritty one. Shell fragments settle at the bottom of the bowl, so decant rather than pour to the last drop.
- YieldA dozen oysters with fried bread serves one generously as a supper dish, or two as a first course. The Baltimore version, at three dozen, serves four in small cups.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms at the height of the American oyster boom, when New York beds still supplied the city in bulk and oysters were cheap enough to be a workingman's food as well as a hotel one. The two versions here mark the class divide within the dish itself: the first is essentially the domestic oyster stew familiar from nineteenth-century household manuals, oysters warmed in their own liquor with cream and butter on fried bread. The second, labelled Baltimore Style, is a restaurant construction emdash oysters cooked in Madeira and finished with espagnole and demi-glace, sauces that only a kitchen keeping a permanent stockpot could produce. Baltimore's association with oysters was real and commercial: the Chesapeake canning and packing trade made the city a byword for the shellfish through the second half of the century. Chesapeake and New York beds were both severely depleted by overharvesting and pollution within a generation of this book's publication.