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Stuffed Oysters
Put the grated yolks of four hard boiled eggs into a basin and mix in half the quantity of minced bacon or salt fat pork, add a little pepper or chopped parsley and make them all into a paste by adding the uncooked yolk of another egg. Split open four dozen oysters, stuff them with this mixture, put them in large oyster shells, coat them over with breadcrumbs, put a little warmed butter on top, place them in an oven and bake until done. Put them on a dish, garnish with pieces of fried bread and serve.
A late-Victorian baked oyster in the half shell, written with the terseness Oscar used throughout the book. The hinge is heat: the oysters want a hot oven and a very short stay in it.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes a range oven and gives no setting. Bake hot, 425-450F, so the crumbs colour before the oysters shrink. "Until done" here means the edges of the oysters have just begun to curl and the crumbs are golden, roughly 8-10 minutes.
- "Split open" means shuckFour dozen oysters are opened raw on the half shell, not cooked open. Reserve the deeper bottom shells; the "large oyster shells" called for at the end are probably just the roomiest of the ones you have already opened, though the wording may also mean larger shells kept aside for serving.
- Cook the pork firstMinced raw bacon or salt fat pork will not reliably render in a few minutes under a crumb crust, and the stuffing turns greasy and pallid. Render it gently and drain before working it into the yolks. Salt pork should be blanched first as well, or the dish will be aggressively salty.
- Grated yolksGrating hard-boiled yolks on a box grater or pushing them through a sieve gives the fine, dry crumb the paste depends on. Mashing with a fork leaves lumps that will not bind.
- "Half the quantity"Half the volume of the grated yolks, so roughly two tablespoons of cooked minced pork to four yolks. The raw yolk is the binder; add it last and only as much as you need to bring the mixture together.
- Stuffing an oysterAn oyster has no cavity to fill. In practice the paste is worked under and around the oyster in its shell, or pressed on top as a thin cap, then crumbed. Any more than a teaspoon per oyster buries the shellfish.
- Pepper or parsleyRead this as pepper and parsley if you like; the paste is bland without both. Hold back on salt until the cured pork is mixed in and tasted.
- Yield and serviceFour dozen serves six to eight as a first course. Steady the shells on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in the pan so the liquor does not run out, and serve on the same bed. The fried bread is a garnish, cut in triangles or fingers.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel, published his cook book in 1896, when New York ate oysters in quantities that are hard to picture now: they were cheap, local, sold from cellars and street stands, and a dish calling for four dozen was a modest one. Baked and stuffed preparations like this belong to the same family as oysters Rockefeller, which Antoine's in New Orleans claims to have created a few years earlier -- the date usually given is 1889 -- a rich, savoury topping browned over the shellfish in its own shell, a way of turning a common bivalve into something worth a restaurant price. The chopped cured pork and sieved egg yolk are older kitchen habits, forcemeat thinking applied to shellfish, and the fried bread garnish is standard Victorian plating, there to catch the liquor as much as to look well.