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Fish with Creamed Oysters
A little left-over boiled fish and a few creamed oysters arranged in ramekins with any white or drawn butter sauce (see pages 67-70), covered with buttered crumbs and browned in oven, make an acceptable luncheon dish.
Fish and Cheese Soufflé See page 169.
A sketch rather than a formula, typical of leftover cookery books that assumed the cook already knew the component sauces. The points below fill in what the original leaves to assumption.
- The hinge: cook the oysters barely at allOysters need only to plump and curl at the edges, roughly a minute or two in the hot cream or sauce. They will then spend more time in the oven, and any additional simmering beforehand turns them tough and shrunken.
- Drawn butter sauceIn American books of this period a drawn butter sauce is a plain flour-and-butter roux let down with hot water or fish stock, seasoned, and finished with more butter. It is not clarified butter; in British usage the term generally means plain melted butter.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the dish is only being browned and heated through. A hot oven -- something like 425F in modern terms -- for roughly 10 to 15 minutes should crisp the crumbs before the sauce breaks; a short pass under the broiler at the end will do the same job.
- Buttered crumbsDry white breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter; period books use anywhere from about two tablespoons to a quarter cup of butter per cup of crumbs. Soft fresh crumbs are more inclined to soak up sauce and soften.
- RamekinsIndividual ovenproof dishes of about 4 to 6 ounces. Fill them nearly full, since the mixture does not rise, and set them on a baking sheet for handling.
- Reheating cooked fishBoth fish and oysters are already cooked or nearly so. Bring the assembled dish to steaming hot right through, then stop; extended baking dries the flaked fish and weeps liquid out of the sauce.
- Proportions and yieldNothing is specified. About a cup of flaked cooked fish, six to eight oysters and three-quarters of a cup of sauce fills two generous ramekins, enough for two at lunch.
- SeasoningBoiled leftover fish is bland and the sauce is a plain one. Lemon juice, cayenne, a little dry mustard or chopped parsley are the period-appropriate corrections and all of them help.
Leftover cookery had its own small shelf of books around the turn of the twentieth century, aimed at households where a joint or a boiled fish was expected to reappear in a second and third form rather than be thrown out. The ramekin dish was one common solution: anything flaked, bound in a white sauce, crumbed and browned could be presented as a fresh course rather than a remnant. Oysters make the combination look richer than it is, and in this period they were still cheap and abundant along the American Atlantic coast, sold by the quart and used freely as a garnish or extender. The cross-references to sauces on pages 67 to 70 are a reminder of how these books were built: a core of foundation recipes, with the leftover chapters written as brief assembly notes on top of them.