Home › The World's Kitchen › Mousse of Oysters
Mousse of Oysters
Place thirty-six freshly opened oysters with their own liquor and a gill water in a small saucepan and boil for five minutes, thoroughly drain and save liquor. Place oysters in a mortar, pound to a fine pulp, remove and press through sieve into a bowl. Mix in saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with two tablespoons flour and heat for two minutes, stirring meanwhile, then add oyster liquor and a gill cream. Sharply mix until it comes to a boil, then add oyster puree, with three egg yolks, a half teaspoon salt, and saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg. Sharply mix with wooden spoon while heating for five minutes and remove to a table, beat whites of three eggs to a stiff froth, add to oysters and mix well until thoroughly amalgamated. Lightly oil the outsides of six paper cases, evenly divide preparation in them and neatly smooth surface. Sprinkle a little Parmesan or Swiss cheese over, set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, dress on dish with a napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and immediately send to table.
A hot oyster soufflé built on a thick béchamel, baked in individual cases. The original gives no oven temperature and assumes a mortar; both need translating.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the water and the cream are each 4 fl oz. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which for cayenne is assertive but correct here.
- How many oysters that isThirty-six shucked oysters of average size come to roughly a pint of meats with their liquor. A pint of shucked oysters sold in a tub works, though you will have less liquor and may need to top it up with the cooking water.
- Oven heatBake at 375F. This is a soufflé mixture in small cases: hot enough to set and lift in twenty minutes, not hot enough to scorch the cheese before the centre cooks.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe beaten whites go in after the base has come off the heat, by which time it will have cooled a little. The original asks you to 'mix well until thoroughly amalgamated'; in modern practice fold until no white streaks remain and stop there.
- Mortar to processorA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still pass the puree through a sieve. Oyster mantles leave fibrous bits that a processor will not break down and that a soufflé shows up immediately.
- Boiling the oystersFive minutes at a boil would ruin oysters served whole. Here they are going to be pounded to a pulp, so the toughening does not matter; what matters is the liquor you save, which carries most of the flavour of the finished dish.
- Paper casesThese were stiff, pleated paper cups used as individual baking moulds. Buttered ramekins or 4 oz souffle dishes are the direct substitute. The oiling of the outside, as written, is usually explained as protection against the paper catching or browning in the oven; with ramekins, butter the inside instead.
- Yield and timingSix small cases, a first course for six. Like any souffle it will sink as it cools, which is why the original insists on sending it to table immediately; the napkin on the serving dish is usually explained as keeping the cases from sliding.
The mousse and the hot soufflé of shellfish belong to the French professional repertoire that American and English cookbooks absorbed wholesale in the decades either side of 1900, and this recipe reads like a chef's dictation: pound, sieve, panada, yolks, whites, cases, napkin, parsley. Oysters were the natural luxury to put through that treatment in the United States, where they were still abundant and cheap enough that thirty-six of them for six small portions raised no eyebrows — the Chesapeake and Long Island beds were being dredged on an industrial scale, and oyster cellars and oyster saloons were a familiar sight in eastern cities. The technique is the same one used for quenelles and forcemeat mousselines: a flour-and-butter base to bind, egg yolks for richness, whipped whites for lift. The recipe offers a choice of "Parmesan or Swiss" cheese rather than naming one, an alternative of the kind common in professional recipes.