Oysters with Fine Herbs

A three-minute dish that lives or dies on the heat of the pan. Ranhofer gives no quantities, so treat it as a technique: about a dozen oysters per person as a first course.

• The hinge: dry oysters, hot butterShucked oysters carry a great deal of liquor, and flour applied to a wet oyster turns to paste. Drain them in a sieve, blot them on a towel, flour them at the last possible moment, and put them into butter that is already foaming.
• "Very warm butter"This means butter hot enough to sizzle on contact but not browned — roughly medium-high in a wide skillet. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better than whole butter at that heat.
• TimingThirty to sixty seconds a side, until the flour is pale gold and the edges just ruffle. A long simmer, as some period oyster recipes call for, leaves them shrunken and rubbery.
• Don't crowd the panOysters release liquid as they heat; too many at once drops the temperature and they steam rather than saute. Cook in two or three batches in a large pan and keep the finished ones on a warmed dish.
• "Fines herbes"In classic French usage this is chervil, parsley, chives and tarragon; Ranhofer omits the tarragon here. His insistence on chopping each herb separately is practical — they bruise at different rates, and chopping them together turns the parsley to green mush.
• Chervil substitutionChervil is still hard to find outside farmers' markets. A little tarragon plus extra parsley approximates its faint anise note; dried chervil contributes nothing.
• Oyster size"Medium-sized" points to the ordinary East Coast market oysters of the day, a few inches at most. Large Pacific oysters are too big for this treatment and may still be raw inside when the flour has browned.
• ServingNo sauce is built in the pan, so serve immediately, straight from the skillet to a hot plate; Ranhofer has the lemon squeezed over before it goes out.