No. 513

Oyster Sauce

Sauce aux Huitres

Poach in white wine one dozen small oysters; strain the juice and leave it to settle. Put on the fire to reduce three gills of veloute sauce (No. 415), and stir into it slowly one gill of good fish stock (No. 195) and the oyster juice, thickening the whole with half a gill of cream, and two egg-yolks; season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and the juice of a lemon; then strain the sauce, add a little butter to it, also the oysters and some chopped parsley.

← No. 512 Sauce a la d'Orleans Hot Sauces No. 514 Sauce a la Palermitaine →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic velouté-based oyster sauce from Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), written for cooks who already had stock and mother sauces standing by. The whole thing hinges on the egg-yolk liaison, which must never boil.

The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, hold the sauce below a simmer — roughly 180F. Bring it to a boil and the yolks scramble; the sauce turns grainy and no amount of straining will bring it back.
GillsA gill is half a cup. Three gills of velouté is 1 1/2 cups, one gill of fish stock is 1/2 cup, half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. The finished sauce comes to about 2 cups, enough for four to six servings of poached fish.
Poach the oysters barelySmall oysters need only to plump and their edges to ruffle — under a minute in barely simmering wine; longer and they tighten into erasers.
Let the juice settleOyster liquor carries grit and bits of shell. Straining and then letting it stand so sediment drops, and decanting off the clear part, is the point of the instruction — do not skip it and do not pour in the last spoonful.
Velouté No. 415A white roux slackened with veal or chicken stock and cooked down until glossy. Any good velouté of the same consistency works; for a fish course, one built on fish stock is closer to the intent.
Fish stock No. 195Ranhofer keys this to his own fish stock; a light fumet of lean white fish bones simmered briefly with wine and aromatics stands in. Bottled clam juice is saltier and more assertive — if you use it, cut back the added salt and taste before seasoning.
Lemon last, and carefullyAcid added to a hot cream-and-yolk sauce encourages curdling. Add the juice off the heat, a little at a time, after the sauce has thickened.
Order of finishingStrain the sauce first, then mount with butter and return the oysters and parsley. Straining after the oysters go in would defeat the purpose.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer cooked at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's internal system set down in print: nearly every recipe cross-references another by number, so a sauce like this one assumes a kitchen already holding velouté, fish fumet and glaze in reserve. Oyster sauce of this kind belongs to the French repertoire of white sauces served with boiled or poached fish, and in New York it had the advantage of an oyster supply so vast and cheap through the nineteenth century that the beds of the Hudson and Long Island Sound fed the city's cellars, stalls and grandest dining rooms alike. The garnish of whole poached oysters returned to a strained, enriched sauce is the standard classical treatment — the oysters flavour the base twice, once through their liquor and again by their presence — and the same logic underlies the better-known sauce Normande. Overharvesting and pollution had largely destroyed the local beds by the early twentieth century, which is why a sauce that once read as everyday now reads as luxurious.