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Broiled Oysters on Toasts
Open thirty-six large fresh oysters, drain on a colander and neatly wipe with a clean towel. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper, roll in oil, then arrange on a double broiler and broil on a brisk fire for four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish over six freshly prepared toasts, pour a little melted butter over, decorate with six sections lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A restaurant-kitchen shorthand recipe that assumes a coal fire and a hinged wire broiler. Two things need translating: the equipment and the cooking time.
- Cut the timeFour minutes a side on a brisk fire will shrink oysters to rubber. Broil only until the edges ruffle and the flesh turns opaque, roughly a minute to ninety seconds a side under a preheated element, and pull them the moment they plump.
- A double broilerThis is a hinged wire gridiron that clamps the oysters between two grids so they can be flipped as one unit over coals. A fish grilling basket does the same job on a grill; under a household broiler, lay them on a rack set in a sheet pan and turn them with tongs.
- Brisk fireCoals burned down to grey and giving strong radiant heat: a fast, fierce surface heat rather than the gentle all-round heat of an oven. A domestic broiler on high, fully preheated, with the pan about four inches from the element, is the nearest equivalent.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon spread over thirty-six oysters. That is assertive but not extreme; scale back if your cayenne is fresh and fierce.
- Roll in oilMost likely olive oil, though the recipe says only "oil." The coating is there to keep the oysters from welding to the wire and to help them colour, so use just enough to slick them rather than enough to drip and flare.
- Buy them in the shell or not at all"Open thirty-six large fresh oysters" means shucking your own. Shucked oysters sold in tubs are usually smaller and sit in their liquor; if you use them, drain hard and dry them thoroughly or they will steam instead of broil.
- The toastsSix slices, cut thick and toasted dry so they hold up under the butter and oyster liquor. Six oysters per toast.
- YieldSix servings as a first course or supper dish, three as a main.
Broiled oysters on toast belongs to the long American stretch when oysters were cheap, plentiful and eaten in quantities that now read as extravagant — by some accounts, thirty-six for six people would have passed without comment at a supper in the Atlantic cities. The phrasing here is professional rather than domestic: "dress on a hot dish," the count of six lemon sections, the garnish specified as "parsley greens" — this is the terse, portion-counted language of a hotel and restaurant kitchen written down for household use, and it assumes the cook already knows what a double broiler looks like. Broiling, as opposed to frying or stewing, is traditionally said to be the treatment that respects a large oyster best, since nothing stands between the shellfish and the fire but a film of oil; the melted butter and lemon at the end are the whole sauce. Recipes of this kind faded less because tastes changed than because the great Eastern oyster beds were fished down and polluted in the first half of the twentieth century, and a dish built on three dozen large fresh oysters stopped being an everyday proposition.