Home › The World's Kitchen › Oysters, Bonne Bouche
Oysters, Bonne Bouche
Place thirty-six medium, drained, freshly opened oysters in a frying pan with a gill port wine or sherry. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg, lightly mix, cover the pan, and let poach for six minutes. Transfer to a chafing dish, pour a Bearnaise sauce over the oysters and serve.
A short, rich savoury from the chafing-dish era. Two things need attention: the poaching time and the amount of cayenne, both of which are out of step with modern taste.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so 4 fl oz of port or sherry for three dozen oysters. Use a dry or medium sherry unless you want the dish frankly sweet.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That makes half a teaspoon of cayenne and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg — the cayenne is aggressive by current standards, and a scant quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks will want alongside a béarnaise.
- Poaching timeSix minutes will shrink the oysters and turn them rubbery. Bring the wine to a bare simmer and cook only until the edges ruffle and the flesh firms slightly, about one to two minutes, then lift them out at once.
- Drain them properlyWet oysters will flood the pan and the sauce will slide off them. Drain well, and keep the oyster liquor for another use rather than adding it here.
- Béarnaise is assumedB dearnaise is assumed -- The book expects you to know the sauce: a reduction of tarragon, shallot and vinegar, mounted with egg yolks and warm butter. Make it before the oysters and hold it just warm, not hot; direct heat or a sharp rise in temperature will break it.
- The chafing dishHere it is used to hold the finished dish at serving temperature at the table rather than to cook in, since the oysters are poached in the frying pan first. Any warmed shallow serving dish works; do not set it over a strong flame, or the b dearnaise will separate and the oysters will keep cooking.
- YieldThree dozen oysters serves six as a first course, four if it is the centre of a light supper. Serve with toast points to take up the sauce.
Bonne bouche is French, and though it is often loosely glossed as "good mouthful" it means literally "good mouth" — from the idiom faire bonne bouche, to leave a pleasant taste — and it names a small, savoury titbit served at the end of a meal or as a hot appetiser; it appears throughout Anglo-American cookery of the late nineteenth century as a fancy label for a rich morsel on toast. The dish belongs to the chafing-dish vogue that swept American entertaining in the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit lamp and a copper pan let a host cook at the table without a servant; oysters, then cheap and shipped inland by the barrel, were the standard raw material for such cookery. Pairing them with a béarnaise — a sauce traditionally, though not documentarily, attributed to Le Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye around 1830 — is characteristic of the period's habit of laying a classical French sauce over an unmistakably American ingredient, the sort of hybrid such a collection might well have been drawn to.