No. 697

Oyster Garnishing a la Tykopf

Garniture d'Huitres a la Tykopf

First blanch thirty-six small oysters, then drain and wipe them on a napkin, cut away the muscles or hard parts and fill in this space with a crab croquette preparation (No. 879), cover the oysters with a light coating of bechamel sauce (No. 409), with finely chopped truffles added, and leave them in till they are very cold, then dip them in bread-crumbs and beaten eggs and fry them in clarified butter.

← No. 696 Oronges a la Livournaise Garnishing Garnishings No. 698 Oysters, Mussels or Milts a la Villeroi Garn →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component from Ranhofer's garnish chapter rather than a standalone dish: crumbed, fried oysters set around a larger platter. It works as a first course on its own, but the method depends entirely on getting the sauce coating cold and firm before breading.

The hinge: chill until solidThe bechamel jacket is what holds everything together, and it must be chilled until genuinely firm on a lightly oiled tray. Warm or tacky sauce will slide off in the crumbs and burst in the fat.
Blanching means seconds, not minutesBring the oysters just to the point where the edges ruffle in their own liquor, then lift them out at once. Anything approaching a simmer of several minutes leaves them rubbery, and they get a second cooking in the fryer.
"The muscles or hard parts"He means the tough adductor muscle where the oyster was attached to its shell. Trim it out with the point of a small knife; the hollow left behind is what receives the croquette mixture.
The cross-referencesNo. 879 is Ranhofer's crab croquette preparation and No. 409 his bechamel. Any stiff crab croquette mixture and a well-reduced, spoon-coating white sauce will do the same job.
Breading orderAs printed the crumbs come before the egg. Standard practice, then and now, is egg first and crumbs second; with a sauce-coated item, breading twice (egg, crumbs, egg, crumbs) gives a shell that will not leak.
Clarified butter and heatClarified butter is specified because the milk solids in whole butter scorch. Hold it around 350°F — hot enough to set the crust in a minute or two, cool enough that the interior only warms through rather than boils out.
TrufflesThe recipe specifies only finely chopped truffles. A teaspoon or so of finely chopped preserved truffle, or truffle peelings, added to the sauce works; truffle oil behaves differently under heat and is not a swap.
YieldThe recipe specifies thirty-six oysters but gives no serving count; as a garnish that suits a large platter, or roughly four to six portions if served as a fried first course with lemon.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its garnish section reads like a parts catalogue: numbered items meant to be assembled into the composed platters of the period. This one belongs to the family of preparations built on the older à la Villeroi method — a morsel of fish, sweetbread or oyster masked in a thick sauce, chilled until the coating sets hard, then crumbed and fried so the sauce becomes a molten interior. Ranhofer's own No. 698, immediately following, is the plain Villeroi version; the Tykopf variant adds a crab stuffing in the cavity left by the trimmed muscle. The name is one of many personal dedications scattered through the book, and like most of them it is not otherwise documented. Oysters appear on nearly every page of American cookery of the 1890s for the simple reason that they were cheap and enormously abundant on the Atlantic coast, which is why a fine-dining kitchen could treat three dozen of them as decoration.