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Oysters, En Coquille
Place thirty-six good-sized freshly opened oysters in a small saucepan with all their liquor and half pint cold water. Season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper and let boil for ten minutes. Heat in another saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, add three tablespoons flour, briskly stir, add one and a half gills hot milk and strain the broth of the oysters into the pan. Sharply mix while cooking for two minutes; pour in one tablespoon sherry and add all the oysters; gently mix with a wooden spoon for one minute and cook for two minutes longer. Divide the preparation equally in six table shells, place on a tin, sprinkle a tablespoon bread crumbs over, place a very small piece of butter on top of each and put in the oven to bake for ten minutes, or until a nice brown. Remove and serve.
A creamed oyster gratin from the era when oysters were cheap enough to buy three dozen for six people. The only real problem in the method is the boiling time.
- Boil the oysters far lessTen minutes at a boil turns oysters into erasers. Bring the liquor and water just to a simmer, drop the oysters in for about two minutes until the edges ruffle, then lift them out and reserve while you build the sauce with the strained broth. They get another few minutes in the oven, which is plenty.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of hot milk is three-quarters of a cup. Half a pint of water is one cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Cayenne at that volume is assertive; an eighth is safer if you are unsure of your tin.
- Oven heatThe original names no temperature. Bake at 400-425F so the crumbs brown in ten minutes rather than sitting pale while the oysters overcook.
- Table shellsLarge deep shells used for baking and serving at table, either natural shells or shell-shaped serving dishes. Ramekins, gratin dishes or ovenproof coquille dishes do the same work.
- Sauce consistencyThree tablespoons flour to one and a half tablespoons butter is a lean roux, and the oyster liquor is thin and salty. Cook it the full two minutes after the liquid goes in, and hold back some broth if it tightens too much.
- SaltAdd the half teaspoon of salt at the end rather than the start. Oyster liquor varies enormously and reducing it concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- YieldSix shells, six oysters each, as a first course. It is rich enough that this is a starter and not a main dish.
En coquille is simply French for "in the shell," and the phrase covers a whole family of dishes in which something is bound in a sauce, returned to a shell or shell-shaped dish, crumbed and browned. It belongs to the hotel-and-restaurant French that shaped American cookbooks around 1900, when a printed menu in English still borrowed its dish names from Paris. The lavishness of thirty-six oysters for six portions is a fair record of the period: East Coast oyster beds were still producing in quantity, though several were already past their peak by 1900, and oysters were street food as much as luxury food.