No. 1062

Oysters on Crusts

Huitres sur Croutes

Blanch in their liquor, three dozen large oysters; pare and cut them up into five-eighths inch squares. Put on to reduce a few spoonfuls of good bechamel sauce (No. 409), mix in with it two or three spoonfuls of raw, chopped, peeled mushrooms, continue to reduce the sauce without ceasing to stir, and incorporate into it slowly a few spoonfuls of the oyster broth, and a little cream. Use this sauce to mingle with the oyster salpicon, being careful to keep the mixture of a good consistency, and use it to cover seven or eight hollow bread-crusts (No. 52), prepared the same as for poached eggs browned and emptied just when ready to serve. Smooth the surfaces, bestrew with bread-crumbs and sprinkle over with a little melted butter; brown them with a hot shovel or else a gas salamander, and serve.

Another Way.—Prepare some oysters the same as oysters a la poulette (No. 1067). Cut the tops from some rolls, empty them by removing all the crumbs, rub fresh butter over the inside and outside of the rolls, color nicely in the oven; when the crust is crisp, fill it with the prepared oysters, put the cover on, and serve on a folded napkin.

← No. 1061 Oysters Fried with Butter or Lard Oysters No. 1063 Oysters, Philadelphia Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have a béchamel already made and a brigade to hollow out the bread. The dish is straightforward once you accept that the sauce, not the oyster, is the work.

The hinge: barely cook the oysters"Blanch in their liquor" means bring the liquor to a bare simmer, slip in the oysters, and pull them the moment the edges ruffle — under a minute. Any longer and the dice turn to erasers inside the sauce, which itself gets a further reduction.
Save the liquorThe oyster broth called for later is the strained blanching liquor. Don't discard it, and don't salt the béchamel until it has gone in, since the liquor is briny.
Béchamel (No. 409)A flour-and-butter white sauce made with milk, aromatically seasoned in Ranhofer's version. A modern medium béchamel works; you want it thick, because the oysters and cream will thin it.
SalpiconSimply the mixture of small, even dice bound in sauce. Ranhofer's five-eighths of an inch is about 1.6 cm — keep the cut coarse so the oyster still reads as oyster.
Raw chopped mushroomsThey go in raw and cook in the reducing sauce, which is where the mushroom liquid gets driven off. "Peeled" reflects the older habit of skinning cap mushrooms; unnecessary with today's cultivated buttons, though trimming the stem base is worth doing.
The crusts (No. 52)Bread cases: crustless bread or small rolls hollowed out, buttered, and crisped in a hot oven until golden. Do this just before serving or they soften.
Hot shovel or gas salamanderAn overhead heat source for glazing. Use a broiler at its highest setting, close to the element, watching constantly — the crumbs and butter go from brown to black quickly.
YieldThree dozen oysters over seven or eight cases: a first course for seven or eight, or a light supper for four.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire written out at length — hence the cross-references to numbered sauces and garnishes rather than self-contained recipes. Oysters appear here in dozens of preparations because late nineteenth-century New York ate them in extraordinary volume: the beds of the Hudson and Raritan estuaries and Long Island Sound supplied a city where oysters were cheap street food as readily as banquet fare. Serving a creamed salpicon in a hollowed bread case was a standard device of the period, and such cases seem to have taken fillings of various kinds — oysters, sweetbreads, mushrooms and poached eggs among them; the case did the work a puff-pastry vol-au-vent or a modern toast point does. The second method, filling buttered rolls and sending them out lidded on a folded napkin, is the same idea dressed for the table.