No. 1071

Oysters with Curry—Indian Style

Huitres au Kari a l'Indienne

Have some large oysters placing them in a saucepan with their own liquor, put on the fire and when slightly firm to the touch, drain and suppress the hard parts. Cut up two ounces of onions into very small squares; fry without coloring, besprinkle with a little flour, and stir well, then moisten with the oyster liquor and white wine, season with salt, pepper and curry, let boil, and despumate; add the oysters and keep warm until ready to serve. In the meantime cook some rice in water with salt and a piece of butter; when done and dry, add to it a very little bechamel sauce (No. 409), also a small pinch of saffron; heat it thoroughly and lay it in a plain border mold dipped in cold water; unmold it on the serving dish; lay the oysters inside this border, and send to the table while very hot.

← No. 1070 Oysters Stuffed and Fried Oysters No. 1072 Oysters with Fine Herbs →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already knows his house sauces and his French shorthand, so the terse verbs hide most of the technique. The hinge is the oysters: they are poached once, briefly, and everything after that is holding them warm.

Poach barely at all"Slightly firm to the touch" means about a minute in their own liquor over moderate heat, until the edges just ruffle. Oysters held any longer, and then reheated in the sauce, shrink and turn to erasers.
"Suppress the hard parts"Cut away the tough adductor muscle and any stiff fringe left after poaching. On large oysters this is worth doing; on small ones there is little to remove.
DespumateSimply skim. Bring the sauce to a boil, hold it at a bare simmer off-centre on the burner, and lift off the scum and any fat that collects at the edge. Five minutes is enough.
CurryPresumably a curry powder of the period, probably mild and turmeric-heavy. Start with about a teaspoon for two dozen oysters and adjust once the sauce has reduced. Note that Ranhofer adds the curry with the salt and pepper after the sauce is moistened, not with the flour.
Béchamel No. 409A milk-based white sauce. For the rice you need only a couple of tablespoons, enough to bind the grains without making risotto of them; any thick white sauce serves.
Saffron and the rice borderCrush the saffron and steep it in a spoonful of hot liquid before stirring it in, or the colour stays in the threads. The rice must be dry and hot to hold the mould; a ring mould wetted with cold water unmoulds cleanly, and a wide shallow bowl of rice with a well in the centre does the same job.
OnionsTwo ounces is roughly a third of a medium onion, cut in a fine dice. Fry without colour: browning fights the pale sauce and the saffron rice.
Liquor and wineOyster liquor is salty and variable. Use roughly equal parts liquor and dry white wine, and hold back the salt until the sauce has boiled and reduced.
YieldThe recipe states no yield; two to three dozen large oysters would serve about four as a first course. It must go to the table immediately; the dish does not stand.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that repertoire — some 3,500 numbered recipes cross-referenced to one another, as this one is to his béchamel at No. 409. The "Indian style" here is Indian by way of Victorian London and Paris: a French velouté-type sauce flavoured with proprietary curry powder, mounted on saffron rice inside a moulded border, which is the standard grand-restaurant treatment of anything labelled à l'indienne in the period. Oysters were then a cheap and abundant New York foodstuff, dredged in vast quantities from beds in the Hudson estuary and Long Island Sound, and Ranhofer devotes dozens of consecutive numbers to them — fried, stuffed, in herbs, in curry — precisely because they were ordinary enough to need dressing up. The rice border is the tell of the era: a dish in which the shape of the food on the platter mattered as much as the flavour.