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Oysters on the Shell
Wash the shell and put them on hot coals, or apon the top of a hot stove, or bake them in a hot oven; open the shells with an oyster knife, taking care to lose none of the liquor, and serve quickly on hot plates, with toast. Oysters may be steamed in the shells, and are excellent eaten in the same manner.
A method rather than a formula: the shells are the cooking vessel, and the only real skill is knowing when to pull them off the heat. Everything worth saying is about heat and liquor.
- The hinge: stop when they gapeAn oyster is done at about the moment the shell cracks open; over direct heat this may take several minutes, depending on the size of the oyster and the heat. Left longer it shrinks and turns to rubber, and the liquor boils away.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figure; "hot oven" in period usage is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Set the oysters cupped-side down on a sheet pan so the liquor pools rather than runs out.
- On the stovetopThe original most likely means the flat cast-iron top of a range, which radiated heat across its surface, though it ran hottest directly over the firebox. A heavy dry skillet or a grill grate over high heat is the nearest equivalent; a modern glass or ceramic cooktop is not, and gritty shells will scratch it.
- Scrubbing matters more than washingWash means scrub under cold running water with a stiff brush. Grit clinging to the shell ends up in the liquor, which is the point of the dish.
- Discard the ones that stay shutAn oyster that will not open after everything else has gaped was probably dead before it went on the heat. Throw it out rather than prying it.
- Opening hot shellsWork with a folded towel and an oyster knife, not a paring knife, and lever at the hinge. The shells will be hot enough to burn and the top valve often lifts with almost no resistance once cooked.
- SteamingAn inch or two of water in a covered pot, oysters in a single layer above the waterline, roughly five minutes or so from the point the steam is rolling. Same signal: the shells open.
- Yield and servingSix oysters per person as a first course and a dozen as a light supper is a conventional modern portion; the recipe itself gives no yield. Hot plates and toast are not decoration here, since the shells cool fast and the toast is what catches the liquor.
Roasting oysters in their own shells is among the simplest ways to cook them and the least like a recipe, which is why the instructions read as a series of alternatives rather than a procedure. In the second half of the nineteenth century oysters were cheap urban food across North America; rail cars and barrels of shell stock carried them well inland, and Chesapeake and Long Island Sound beds were worked hard enough that harvests peaked in the 1880s and fell steeply thereafter. That abundance is why a domestic cookbook of this period gives the simplest treatment barely four lines. The insistence on losing none of the liquor is the whole argument for cooking them in the shell: the shell holds what the oyster gives up, and the liquor is the seasoning.