No. 2351

Oysters Bechamel in Their Shells

Huitres Bechamel dans leurs Coquilles

Poach and drain three dozen oysters; fry colorless in butter three shallots, moisten with white wine and the oyster liquor, and dilute with bechamel sauce (No. 409). Cook and despumate thicken with egg-yolks, butter, and cream; season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, stirring so that the sauce thickens properly; then add the oysters to it, and with this fill the well-cleaned, deep oyster shells; sprinkle over fried bread-crumbs and butter, then brown them in the oven.

← No. 2350 Oysters Baked in Their Shells Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2352 Oysters Roasted and English Style in Their S →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has béchamel standing by, so the whole dish reads as three lines of shorthand. Two things decide whether it works: the oysters must barely see heat, and the egg liaison must never boil.

Poaching the oystersBring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, roughly 30 to 60 seconds, then lift them out at once. They will get a second heating under the broiler; anything longer at the first stage gives you rubber.
"Fry colorless"Sweat the shallots in butter over low heat until soft and translucent with no browning at all. Color here would show as brown flecks in a sauce that is meant to be ivory.
Béchamel No. 409Ranhofer's béchamel is a white roux moistened with milk and simmered with aromatics before straining; nineteenth-century versions of the sauce were often enriched with veal as well. A well-made modern béchamel, fairly thick and seasoned lightly, stands in without complaint since the oyster liquor and wine carry the flavor.
"Despumate"An old kitchen term for simmering a sauce gently and skimming off the scum and fat that rise to the surface. Expect a spell of low simmering with a spoon in hand; it is what makes the sauce glossy rather than cloudy.
The liaisonTemper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return them off the heat, and hold the pan below a simmer while it thickens. Once the yolks are in, boiling will curdle the sauce into grains.
Reducing the wineThe recipe does not call for a reduction, but cooking the white wine and oyster liquor down before the béchamel goes in guards against a thin sauce that tastes raw of alcohol.
The shellsUse the deep bottom shells, scrubbed and boiled for a few minutes to clean them, then dried. Steady them on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in the pan so the sauce does not run out.
BrowningRanhofer gives no temperature; a hot oven, around 450F, for a few minutes, or better a broiler for one to two minutes with the pan close to the element. You want color on the crumbs, not further cooking of the oysters.
Crumbs and yield"Fried bread-crumbs" means crumbs already tossed golden in butter in a pan, not raw ones; they brown evenly and quickly. Three dozen oysters fills three dozen shells; Ranhofer gives no yield, but that would make roughly six first-course portions.

A Little History

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 essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in numbered order, which is why this entry cross-references a sauce by number rather than repeating it. American oysters were still cheap and enormously abundant then, dredged by the boatload from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound, and a menu might carry a dozen preparations of them at once. Serving a rich sauce back in the deep half-shell, gratinated under crumbs, is a French treatment applied to a local glut: the technique and vocabulary are Parisian, the raw material is the New York harbor. The formula also shows how the classical brigade worked, with a mother sauce made in bulk and finished a portion at a time with wine, reduction and a yolk liaison.