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Escaloped Oysters
Mrs. Andrews.
Butter the dish, (common earthern pie-plates are the best,) cover the bottom of the dish with very fine bread crumbs; add a layer of oysters; season with pepper and salt; alternate the crumbs and oysters until you have three layers; finish with crumbs; cover the top with small pieces of butter; finish around the edge with bread cut into small oblong pieces dipped in butter; bake half an hour; unless shell oysters, wash them thoroughly and strain.
A contributed recipe of the sort that assumes the cook already knows how many oysters fill a pie plate. A few blanks need filling before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a range of this period had no thermostat and the cook judged the oven by hand. Half an hour suits what would now be a moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, hot enough to set the layers and brown the top crumbs without reducing the oysters to erasers.
- The hinge: do not overbakeOysters need only a few minutes of real heat to firm up. Half an hour is tolerable here largely because they sit between crumb layers in a shallow dish; take it out when the top is brown and the edges bubble, and no longer.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For a standard 9-inch pie plate, reckon on about a pint of shucked oysters and roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of fine dry crumbs, with 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter dotted over the whole.
- "Unless shell oysters, wash them thoroughly and strain"Oysters were sold shucked in tubs or cans, often carrying grit and shell fragments; the instruction is to rinse those and strain the liquor before use. Oysters you shuck yourself go in as they are, with their liquor.
- CrumbsFine dry bread crumbs, not fresh soft ones and not modern panko. Rolled cracker crumbs are a common alternative in recipes of the period.
- Keep it moistNothing but butter and oyster liquor binds this. Strained liquor poured over the layers, or a few spoonfuls of cream, keeps the middle from baking dry, which is the usual failure.
- The bread borderThe oblong pieces dipped in butter around the rim are croutons that crisp as the dish bakes, both garnish and edging. Cut them about the thickness of a finger so they colour rather than burn.
- YieldOne pie plate serves four as a first course or supper dish, two or three as a main with bread and something green.
Escalloped, or scalloped, oysters are generally said to take their name from cooking in a shell -- the old escalope or scallop shell that is traditionally held to have served as a small baking dish before pie plates and gratin dishes were common. In the second half of the nineteenth century oysters were among the cheapest animal foods in the United States, shipped inland by rail packed in ice and sold shucked by the can and the gallon, which is why a household book like this one treats them as an everyday ingredient rather than a luxury. Layering them with buttered crumbs stretched a modest quantity into a dish for the whole table and gave the cook something that could be assembled in advance and slid into the oven. The attribution to Mrs. Andrews suggests a contributed collection, a book gathering recipes from many hands rather than setting down the technique of a single author.