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Curried Oyster Patties
Prepare six patties and keep hot. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a small saucepan; add half a finely minced onion and half a sound, peeled, minced apple; let cook for eight minutes, occasionally stirring, then mix in two tablespoons flour, moisten with a half pint broth and half gill cold milk. Season with a half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a half teaspoon curry powder. Mix well until it comes to a boil, let cook for fifteen minutes, and strain through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Plunge twenty-four large, fresh-opened oysters with their own liquor and a half pint water in a saucepan and boil for five minutes. Drain and keep a half gill of the liquor. Add the oysters and the half gill liquor to the same; mix a little and cook for five minutes more. Arrange the six hot patties on a hot dish, then pour four oysters into each patty, divide the sauce equally over them and serve.
A late-Victorian curry sauce built on the classic onion-and-apple base, spooned into pastry cases. Nearly everything here works as written except the oyster timing, which needs cutting hard.
- The oysters are the hingeFive minutes at a boil, then five minutes more in the sauce, will turn large oysters into rubber. Poach them in their liquor and water for a minute or two, just until the edges ruffle, then hold them off the heat and fold them into the finished sauce at the last moment.
- Patties"Patties" here means baked puff-pastry cases — vol-au-vent shells — not meat patties. Six frozen puff pastry shells, baked and kept warm in a low oven, do the job.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill is 2 fl oz, or 4 tablespoons. A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne; start with a pinch.
- Half pintAn American half pint is 1 cup of broth. If you are working from a British-era edition the imperial half pint is closer to 10 fl oz; either makes a workable sauce.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A regular fine sieve works, pressed through with the back of a ladle to get the apple and onion pulp into the sauce rather than leaving it behind.
- Curry powderHalf a teaspoon in this quantity of sauce is timid by modern standards; commercial curry blends of the period were generally milder than what is sold now. Taste and add more, and let the powder cook a moment in the butter with the flour so it loses its raw edge.
- YieldSix patties, four oysters each — a first course for six, or lunch for three.
Curry sauce made with onion and apple, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, is the standard Anglo-Indian formula that British cookery absorbed through the nineteenth century and passed on to American kitchens. Oysters were still relatively cheap and plentiful in American cities of this period, which is why they turn up in patties, croquettes, soups and stuffings across books of the time rather than being treated as a luxury. The pairing of oyster and curry sauce, served in a puff-pastry case, suits the hotel and restaurant cooking of the era — a small, showy, plated first course that could be assembled quickly once the sauce was made and the shells were baked.