No. 1065
Oysters, Bechamel with Truffles
Huitres Bechamel aux Truffes
Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with a stocked sauce station, so the recipe is really an assembly note. The whole dish stands or falls on how briefly the oysters meet heat.
- The hinge: poach barely at allOysters need only to be warmed in their own liquor until the edges ruffle, roughly one to two minutes at a bare simmer. Ranhofer sends you to No. 1067 for the poaching; anything longer and they tighten into rubber, and no amount of sauce will rescue them.
- Cream bechamel (No. 411)Ranhofer cross-refers to a cream-finished bechamel rather than a plain milk one. A modern bechamel enriched with a few tablespoons of heavy cream at the end is a fair equivalent; keep it a little loose, since reducing with the oyster liquor will thicken it further.
- Oyster liquorThis is the strained liquid the oysters were shucked and poached in, not bottled clam juice. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth to catch shell grit, then reduce it into the sauce until the flavor concentrates.
- Salt lastThe recipe says to season with salt, but oyster liquor is already saline and reduction concentrates it. Taste after the liquor has cooked down and adjust then.
- Butter off the heatThe finishing butter is a monte au beurre: stir it in cold, in one piece, with the pan off the burner. If the sauce boils after the butter goes in it will separate and turn greasy.
- TrufflesBlack truffle is the likeliest reading for a French kitchen of this date, chopped very fine and added at the last second so its aroma is not cooked off. Preserved truffle peelings or a small amount of good truffle paste come closer than truffle oil, which reads as synthetic against a delicate cream sauce.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a light hand; the recipe gives no quantity, and nutmeg easily dominates a delicate cream sauce.
- Yield and serviceService -- the recipe gives no quantities or yield. The neighbouring entry (No. 1064, oysters on toast) suggests the setting: serve immediately, as the sauce dulls and the oysters firm as it sits.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a long run of oyster preparations that reflects how cheap and ubiquitous the oyster then was in the city. What makes the dish expensive is not the shellfish but the truffles and the cream bechamel, both signals of the French haute cuisine Ranhofer had trained in before emigrating. The numbered cross-references, to sauce No. 411 and poached oysters No. 1067, are typical of the book's structure: it was written as a working reference for kitchens that already had a sauce cook turning out bechamel by the gallon, not as a standalone recipe. New York's oyster trade collapsed within a generation of this book's publication, a decline generally attributed to pollution and typhoid contamination as much as to overfishing, and the city's oyster cellars, which had fed rich and poor alike, largely disappeared by the 1920s.