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Oysters, Bordelaise
Carefully open twenty-four large, fresh Rockaway oysters and leave them on the deep shells. Arrange in a roasting pan. Season with a level teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, equally distributed. Divide two light tablespoons finely chopped, sound shallots over the twenty-four oysters; pour one gill claret over them and carefully sprinkle three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs on top. Place in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove, place on a hot dish, pour all the gravy from the pan over the oysters and serve.
A fast, hot-oven oyster dish that depends on the wine and shallot reducing into the shell liquor rather than boiling the oysters to rubber. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield.
- Gill of claretA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Claret means dry red Bordeaux; any dry, unoaked red works, but avoid anything jammy or high in alcohol, since it will not have time to cook off.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature. Ten minutes only makes sense in a hot oven; around 450F will keep the wine bubbling and colour the crumbs before the oysters overcook.
- Rockaway oystersNamed for the beds off Rockaway, Long Island, which were closed to harvest long ago after pollution and heavy fishing. Use any large, deep-cupped East Coast oyster with plenty of liquor; two dozen would serve about four as a first course, though the recipe states no yield.
- On the deep shellShuck over a bowl, cut the muscle free from the shell but leave the oyster sitting in its own liquor in the deep half. That liquor is most of the gravy poured back over at the end.
- Steady the shellsA bed of coarse rock salt or crumpled foil in the roasting pan keeps the shells level so the claret and liquor stay in rather than running out and scorching on the pan.
- Shallots"Sound" simply means firm and unsprouted. Chop them very fine; in ten minutes coarse shallot stays raw and harsh against the wine.
- Judging donenessThe oysters are done when the edges ruffle and the flesh firms slightly, often before the full ten minutes with smaller oysters. Past that they tighten and weep.
- CrumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried or packaged ones, which soak up the wine and turn to paste. A few drops of melted butter over the crumbs helps them brown in the short bake.
Bordelaise in French cooking means, broadly, in the manner of Bordeaux, and its defining marks are wine and shallot; the classic sauce uses red Bordeaux, shallots and marrow, and this oyster dish keeps the wine and shallot while dropping everything else. The Rockaway name is the period detail worth noticing: through the nineteenth century the beds around Rockaway and Jamaica Bay supplied New York with oysters cheap enough to be street food, and a cook writing for a metropolitan audience could name a variety the way one now names a region of coffee. Pollution and overharvesting closed those waters in the early twentieth century, so the recipe outlived its main ingredient. The book itself, generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens, belongs to a wave of turn-of-the-century American compendia that filed dishes by nationality and expected the cook to open the oysters at home.