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Oyster Patties
Aunt Maggie.
Make some rich puff paste and bake it in very small tin patty pans; when cool, turn them out upon a large dish; stew some large fresh oysters with a few cloves, a little mace and nutmeg; then add the yolk of one egg, boiled hard and grated; add a little butter, and as much of the oyster liquor as will cover them. When they have stewed a little while, take them out of the pan and set them to cool. When quite cold, lay two or three oysters in each shell of puff paste.
A cold hors d'oeuvre from an era when oysters were cheap and puff paste was made at home. The whole dish turns on not overcooking the shellfish.
- The hinge: oyster timing"Stewed a little while" meant something looser then than it should now. Large oysters need only two or three minutes in their hot liquor, just until the edges ruffle; beyond that they tighten into rubber, and the recipe then cools them further, which cannot undo it.
- Patty pansThese were small shallow tin moulds, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup or smaller. Line them with puff pastry and bake in a hot oven (about 425F) until dry and coloured through; store-bought all-butter puff is a fair substitute for "rich puff paste."
- Turn them out when coolThe shells must be fully baked and cold before filling, and the oysters fully cold before they go in; the recipe insists on cooling at both stages.
- Mace and clovesUse whole blades of mace and whole cloves so they can be fished out; ground cloves in particular will overwhelm oysters at anything above a pinch. Two or three cloves and a single blade of mace is enough for a pint of oysters.
- The grated egg yolkA hard-boiled yolk, grated or pushed through a sieve, was one period way of giving body to a small quantity of liquid without flour. One yolk with a knob of butter will lightly bind the liquor from a pint of oysters.
- Oyster liquorShucked oysters sold in tubs come with their liquor; drain and reserve it rather than rinsing. If there is not enough to cover, top up with a little water or light stock.
- Yield and servingA pint of shucked large oysters, at two or three per shell, fills only a handful of small patty cases. Serve them the day they are assembled, cold, as a first course or supper dish; the pastry softens overnight.
Patties of this kind are close kin to the French bouchée — a small puff-paste case baked hollow and filled after the fact — and by the middle of the nineteenth century they were standard American party food, appearing at receptions, church suppers and wedding breakfasts alongside chicken salad and ice cream. Oysters made the obvious filling: the East Coast beds were still producing on an industrial scale, barrels of shucked oysters travelled inland by rail and ice, and the shellfish were cheap. The seasoning here — cloves, mace, nutmeg — is an older English habit, and the sieved hard yolk used as a binder belongs to the same conservative tradition. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by named Chicago women, which is why this one arrives credited to Aunt Maggie rather than to any professional kitchen.