Butter a deep dish and pour into it the oysters with their own liquor; season with salt and black pepper, and add the heart stalks of a head of celery cut into thin lengthwise slices, and a few small pieces of fresh butter; cover it over with another dish and set it into a moderate oven for fifteen minutes, then serve.
A four-ingredient oyster braise from Ranhofer's The Epicurean: the whole method is oysters, their liquor, celery heart and butter, sealed under a second dish. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing needs adjusting.
Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for most of the last third of the nineteenth century, and The Epicurean (1894) is his working compendium — said to run to several thousand numbered recipes, largely French in technique and vocabulary, applied to the American larder. Oysters get a long run of entries because they were then cheap, abundant and eaten in enormous quantity: New York harbour beds supplied the city's oyster cellars and saloons before pollution and overharvesting closed most of them in the early twentieth century. The dish sits among the more elaborate preparations in the section — Villeroi, Pompadour, rissolettes — and is notable for restraint: no cream, no crumb, no sauce beyond the oysters' own liquor mounted with butter, with celery heart for a cool vegetal edge.