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Escaloped Oysters
Take crushed crackers, not too fine; drain liquor from a quart of oysters and carefully remove all bits of shell, butter a deep dish or pan, cover the bottom with crackers, put in a layer of oysters seasoned with salt and pepper and bits of butter in plenty, then a layer of crackers, then oysters, and so on until dish is full, finishing with the crackers covered with bits of butter; pour over the whole the oyster-liquor added to one pint of boiling water (boiled and skimmed), place in a hot oven, bake half an hour, add another pint of hot water, or half pint water and half pint of milk, in which a small lump of butter has been melted; bake another half hour, and, to prevent browning too much, cover with a tin or sheet-iron lid. All bread-crumbs, or a mixture of crackers and bread-crumbs may be used when more convenient. As the amount of liquor in oysters varies, and the proportion of crackers or breadcrumbs to the oysters also varies, the quantity of water must be increased or diminished according to judgment and taste. Some prefer to cook half the time given above. Boiled macaroni may be used in place of cracker-crumbs.
A wet, deep-dish version of scalloped oysters from the era when the dish was closer to a savory pudding than the shallow, crisp-topped casserole most cooks make now. The liquid is the whole question.
- Judge the liquid, not the recipeTwo pints of added water on top of the oyster liquor is a great deal, and the text says so obliquely when it tells you to increase or diminish "according to judgment." Coarse cracker crumbs in a deep dish will absorb it; fine crumbs or a shallow pan will leave you with soup. Add the first pint, watch what the crumbs do, and hold back the second unless the dish looks dry.
- A hot ovenRead that as roughly 400 to 425F. If you take the shorter route the book allows, the same temperature for about half an hour total will set the crumbs and cook the oysters through.
- An hour is a long time for oystersOysters firm up in two or three minutes of real heat and turn rubbery well before an hour. The full-length bake produces a soft, bready pudding in which the oysters are a flavoring rather than a texture. The "half the time given above" variant noted at the end will give a fresher result.
- A quart of oystersThat is shucked oysters with their liquor. Drained weight and count vary a good deal with grade, so expect something in the range of one and a half to two pounds of meats and anywhere from three to five dozen oysters. Supermarket tubs run 8, 12 or 16 ounces; two pint containers make up the quart.
- CrackersPlain soda crackers or oyster crackers, crushed coarsely as instructed. Saltines work; the modern buttery round cracker is sweeter and much richer, and combined with "bits of butter in plenty" at every layer it will read as greasy.
- Boiled and skimmedThe oyster liquor is cloudy and carries grit and shell fragments. Bringing it to a boil with the water and skimming clarifies it; straining through a fine sieve or coffee filter does the same job faster.
- The tin lidFoil, loosely tented over the dish for the second half of the bake, is the direct equivalent.
- SaltSeason lightly. Oysters, their liquor and soda crackers are all salty, and an hour of baking concentrates the whole thing.
- YieldA quart of oysters in a deep dish serves six to eight as a side or supper dish.
Scalloped oysters were a fixture of nineteenth-century American cooking from New England to the Gulf, and their ubiquity had a practical cause: oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland in barrels and tins once rail and ice made it possible, so a dish once coastal turned up on tables far from any water. The name reflects the old culinary sense of escallop or scallop, food baked with crumbs in a shell or shell-shaped dish -- a usage tied to the scallop shell itself rather than opposed to it -- and the spelling wandered freely through cookbooks of the period. The suggestion of boiled macaroni in place of crumbs is a reminder that macaroni appeared in American cookbooks of the day as a plain starch.