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Oysters, Finnoise
Open twenty-four fresh, large oysters; detach them entirely from the deep shells, but leave them in the same deep shells with their own gravy. Finely chop up two medium, green peppers and evenly divide them on top of the twenty-four oysters. Squeeze two fresh red tomatoes through a sieve into a bowl and pour the juice over the oysters. Cut twenty-four very thin pieces bacon one inch square, and arrange a piece on top of each oyster. Dredge a tablespoon fresh bread crumbs over all. Place them on a tin and bake in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve. Should any of the juice from the oysters drop in the pan pour it over them before serving.
A half-shell bake that depends almost entirely on heat and speed: the oysters need to set, not stew. Everything else is assembly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; oven heat is left to the cook's judgement, as was normal before thermostatic ovens. A hot oven, around 450F, should crisp the bacon and colour the crumbs before the oysters shrink; at a moderate 350F the full fifteen minutes is more likely to give tough oysters and underdone bacon.
- Fifteen minutes is the outer limitLarge oysters in the shell are done when the edges just ruffle and the liquor bubbles, often at eight to ten minutes at high heat. Treat fifteen as the maximum for very large shells and start checking early.
- Steady the shellsDeep half shells rock on a flat pan and spill the liquor the recipe is at pains to save. Spread a half-inch bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil on the tin and press each shell into it.
- The baconOne-inch squares cut "very thin"; modern sliced bacon is roughly that thickness, so cut the squares from a rasher. If your bacon is thick-cut it will not render in the time available, so partly cook it first or slice it thinner.
- Tomato juice, not pulpTomato -- Pressing two ripe tomatoes through a sieve gives a small quantity of thin pulp and juice, with skins and seeds held back: enough to season, not enough liquid to poach the oysters. Canned tomato or passata is thicker and will smother them.
- Green peppersThese are sweet bell peppers, not chillies. Chop them very fine, as coarse dice will still be raw and squeaky after ten minutes in the shell.
- CrumbsA single tablespoon across twenty-four oysters is a dusting, not a topping. Use fresh soft crumbs as specified; dried crumbs will scorch at this heat.
- Buying and yieldTwenty-four oysters serves four as a first course. Buy them closed and heavy, shuck them yourself or have them opened the same day, and discard any that are open and do not close when tapped.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American hotel and restaurant kitchens catalogued dishes under French-style tags, and finnoise, "in the Finnish manner," is one of those tags applied more loosely than its literal meaning suggests. In classical garnish vocabulary such names often signal little more than a fixed set of accompaniments, and here the fixed set is peppers, tomato and bacon over an oyster baked on the deep shell. What the recipe really documents is the American oyster at the height of its cheapness: in the first years of the twentieth century Atlantic and Gulf beds supplied city markets in enormous volume, and cookbooks of the period run to dozens of oyster preparations, fried, panned, scalloped, stewed and, as here, roasted on the shell under something salty and something acid. The tomato-and-green-pepper combination points to the same turn-of-the-century taste that produced Creole and Spanish garnishes on hotel menus, whatever the northern name attached to it.