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Oyster Patties, Bechamel
Prepare and keep hot six patties. Plunge thirty-six freshly opened oysters in a pint boiling water with a half teaspoon salt for five minutes, then drain. Mix and heat in a saucepan one ounce butter with an ounce flour, then pour in one gill each hot milk and cream, a half gill of the oyster broth, half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well with a whisk until it comes to a boil, add the oysters with two tablespoons sherry, gently mix and cook for five minutes. Place the patties on a hot dish, divide the oysters in them, place the covers on and serve.
A straightforward oyster fricassee in a cream sauce, spooned into pastry cases. The measurements are Edwardian restaurant shorthand, and the cooking times belong to an era that liked its oysters firm.
- The oysters are the hingeFive minutes in boiling water and five more in the sauce is roughly ten minutes of cooking, which turns oysters tough and shrunken. Poach them only until the edges ruffle, under two minutes, and add them to the finished sauce off the heat to warm through.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So the sauce takes 1/2 cup hot milk, 1/2 cup cream and 1/4 cup of the oyster poaching liquid.
- A saltspoonAbout 1/4 teaspoon. Cayenne at that quantity is assertive; a scant 1/8 teaspoon is closer to modern taste, and the nutmeg should be grated fresh.
- Ounce butter, ounce flourWeigh if you can, but 2 tablespoons butter and a scant 1/4 cup flour is the working equivalent. That is a fairly stiff roux for a cup and a quarter of liquid, and the sauce will be thick enough to sit in pastry without running.
- "Patties"Puff-paste cases with lids, what a French kitchen calls bouchées or small vol-au-vents. Frozen puff pastry shells work; bake them, hollow any soft centre, and keep them warm in a low oven so they do not go soggy under the sauce.
- Don't waste the liquorThe recipe poaches in plain salted water, but the oysters' own liquor is the best part of the flavour. Strain it and count it toward the half gill of "oyster broth."
- SherryA dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry. Two tablespoons stirred into the hot sauce and cooked five minutes will lose some, but not all, of its alcohol.
- YieldSix patties, six oysters apiece, so a first course for six. Salt is added twice here; taste before the second half teaspoon, as the oyster liquor is already saline.
Oyster patties were a fixture of American hotel and club cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by the barrel. The Bechamel in the title points to the white sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux with milk, one of the sauces codified in French professional kitchens and generally traced to the seventeenth-century French court steward Louis de Bechameil, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The style of the book belongs to the New York restaurant cooking of the Delmonico's era, where the small puff-paste case filled with a bound ragout was standard service for a light entree: made ahead, held hot, and assembled at the last second. The nutmeg and cayenne are an older English habit clinging to a French technique, and the sherry places the dish in the same family as scalloped oysters and oyster stew, staples of American winter tables before the great beds were fished out.