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Croutes of Oysters, Original
Cut covers off six French rolls, scoop out the soft parts, then lightly butter the insides, place on a tin and set in oven for five minutes. Remove and keep hot, place thirty-six freshly opened, medium oysters with their liquor in a saucepan with two gills water and boil for three minutes, Skim the scum from the surface, heat in a saucepan two tablespoons melted butter, add half a chopped, seeded green pepper, three finely-chopped shallots and two finely chopped, well peeled and cleaned fresh mushrooms, then gently brown for five minutes, stirring once in a while. Add two light tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for half a minute, strain the oyster liquor through a cheesecloth into this pan, add a half gill cream, two tablespoons sherry, three saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne and a half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply mix until it comes to a boil, then let gently boil for six minutes, add the oysters with the juice of a quarter of a lemon and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Mix well and cook for three minutes; place two anchovies in oil in each roll, evenly divide the oysters and sauce in the rolls, place their covers on, arrange on a dish, decorate with a little parsley greens and send to the table.
A creamed oyster filling served in hollowed hot rolls — a hot hors d'oeuvre or light supper for six. Most of the work is in the sauce; the oysters need far less time than the text gives them.
- The hinge: oyster timingAs written the oysters are boiled three minutes, then simmered three more in the sauce. Six minutes of cooking turns medium oysters tough and shrunken. Poach them only until the edges ruffle, roughly a minute, lift them out, and return them to the finished sauce off the heat just long enough to warm through.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water and a half gill is a quarter cup of cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 and 1/8 teaspoon respectively.
- Oven for the rollsNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for five minutes is enough to dry and crisp the buttered interiors so they do not go to pulp under the sauce.
- French rollsThese are small crusty bread rolls, not the long baguette-style loaf the name suggests today. Choose rolls with a firm crust that will hold a wet filling; soft dinner rolls collapse.
- The liquor is the stockBoiling the oysters in water and then straining that liquid through cheesecloth into the roux gives the sauce its savoury base; no other stock goes into the dish. Strain it carefully; oyster liquor carries grit and shell fragments.
- Thickening ratioTwo tablespoons butter and two "light" tablespoons flour against roughly a cup of oyster liquor plus a quarter cup cream should give a pourable rather than stiff sauce, and six minutes of gentle boiling will reduce it further; stop when it coats a spoon, since it must not run out of the rolls.
- AnchoviesTwo oil-packed anchovy fillets per roll is assertive against 3/4 teaspoon of added salt. Taste the sauce before salting and consider cutting the salt back, or halving the anchovies.
- ServingSix rolls, six servings as a first course or three as a light supper. Assemble at the last moment — filled rolls soften quickly.
Serving a rich creamed filling inside a hollowed, crisped bread case was standard hotel and restaurant practice on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, and appears variously as croûtes, croustades, timbales or patty cases depending on whether the shell was bread, fried bread or pastry. Oysters were an obvious filling: still cheap and abundant along the American Atlantic coast before the great beds were depleted and polluted in the early twentieth century, they turn up in this period's cookbooks stewed, scalloped, fried, curried and creamed. The seasoning here — green pepper, shallot, sherry, cayenne, nutmeg, anchovy, lemon — is a French kitchen's vocabulary applied to an American shellfish.