Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Creamed Oysters
Creamed Oysters
Clara E. Thatcher.
To one quart of oysters take one pint of cream or sweet milk; thicken with a little flour, as for gravy; when cooked pour in the oysters with liquor; pepper, salt and butter the mixture. Have ready a platter with slices of nicely browned toast, pour creamed oysters on toast and serve hot.
A plain white-sauce oyster stew served over toast, with the proportions left largely to the cook's judgment. Two things need pinning down: how much flour, and how briefly the oysters cook.
- Cook the oysters barely at allAdd the shucked oysters to the finished sauce and hold it just below a simmer for two to three minutes, until the edges ruffle and the flesh turns opaque. Anything longer and they shrink and turn to rubber, which is the usual failure of this dish.
- How much flour"Thicken with a little flour, as for gravy" assumes you know the ratio. For one pint of cream or milk, about 2 tablespoons flour gives a pourable sauce, 3 tablespoons one that will sit on toast without running off. Note that the recipe adds its butter to the finished mixture rather than working it into a roux first.
- A quart of oystersThat means a quart of shucked oysters in their liquor, roughly 2 lb; depending on grade that can be anywhere from about 40 to 100 oysters. Fishmongers still sell them this way by the pint and quart; from jars, two 16-oz containers.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were still everyday kitchen ingredients. Whole milk or cream both work; cream is less likely to break when the oyster liquor goes in.
- The liquorStrain it through a fine sieve or cheesecloth first, since shell grit often settles in the bottom of the container. The recipe pours the liquor in with the oysters; adding it to the sauce first and letting it heat through spreads the salt and brine flavour before the oysters go in.
- Season lastOyster liquor is already salty and its strength varies from batch to batch. Add the butter and pepper, taste, then salt.
- The toastCut it thick and toast it hard and dry. Soft bread collapses under a cream sauce within a minute of serving.
- YieldServes four to six as a supper dish, two slices of toast apiece.
Creamed oysters on toast belonged to the everyday, not the special-occasion, end of nineteenth-century American cooking. Oysters were cheap protein sold by the barrel and the quart in inland cities as well as coastal ones, and cookbooks of the period carry them fried, scalloped, in patties, in soup and pickled. This version is essentially an oyster stew stiffened to sauce consistency and given something to sit on " the kind of thing that turned up at a late supper, a church social, or a Sunday tea when a hot dish was wanted without much work. The attribution to Clara E. Thatcher may point to the community and subscription cookbooks of the era, which were assembled from contributions by named local women and printed with their credits intact, though a name at the head of a recipe is consistent with such a contribution without establishing it.