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Oysters in the Shell
Open the shells, keeping the deepest ones for use. Melt some butter, season with minced parsley and pepper. When slightly cooled, roll each oyster in it, using care that it drips but little, and lay in the shells. Add to each shell a little lemon juice, cover with grated bread-crumbs, place in a baking-pan and bake in a quick oven; just before they are done, add a little salt. Serve in the shells.
A simple baked oyster on the half shell, closer to modern oysters gratinéed than to a stuffing-heavy Rockefeller. The whole dish hinges on how briefly it sits in the oven.
- "A quick oven"Read this as 425–450F. At that heat the crumbs brown in roughly 6–8 minutes, which is about as long as an oyster can stand before it tightens and weeps liquor into the shell.
- Don't overbakeThe oysters are done when the edges just ruffle and the crumbs are golden. Anything past that and they go rubbery — the reason the original hurries them through a hot oven rather than a moderate one.
- Opening and reserving shells"Keeping the deepest ones" means saving the cupped bottom shell, which holds the butter and juice; discard the flat top. Scrub the cups and check for grit and shell fragments before filling.
- Steady the shellsBed the filled shells in a pan of coarse salt or crumpled foil so they sit level and nothing spills. The recipe says only to "place in a baking-pan" and gives no instruction for steadying them.
- The butter coatingMelted butter with minced parsley and pepper, cooled until it thickens slightly, clings to the oyster instead of running off. If it sets too firm, warm it a few seconds; if it is hot and thin, the oyster arrives in the shell naked.
- Crumbs"Grated bread-crumbs" are dry crumbs grated from stale bread, coarser than canned crumbs and much coarser than panko. A tablespoon per shell is plenty; a thick lid steams the oyster rather than crisping.
- Salt at the endSalting late is deliberate — oysters are already saline and salt drawn out early leaves them shrunken. A pinch as they come from the oven is enough.
- QuantityFigure six oysters per person as a first course, a dozen as a light main. About 4 tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of chopped parsley will dress two dozen.
Baked oysters on the half shell belong to a period when oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten by the barrel along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and when a cookbook could reasonably assume its reader had a pile of shells to work with. The Dixie Cook Book, a late nineteenth-century Southern compilation in the same mold as the widely circulated Buckeye books, devotes a full shell-fish section to them. What distinguishes this version is its restraint: butter, parsley, pepper, lemon, crumbs, and nothing else. The elaborate stuffed and sauced oysters that New Orleans restaurants made famous around the same decades are cousins to this dish, but the household recipe stays plain, which is what let it work with whatever the oyster boat brought in.