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Oysters, Hollandaise
Open twenty-four large oysters and place them in a saucepan with their own liquor, two gills water and half teaspoon salt. Place pan on fire and let boil for five minutes, remove, drain them on a sieve, then on a cloth. Prepare a Hollandaise sauce, place oysters in a sautoir, pour sauce over, toss them well, then pour into a hot dish and serve.
A very short dish that depends almost entirely on restraint: two brief operations, both of which are easy to overcook. The instructions assume a professional cook who already knows how to hold a hollandaise.
- The five minutes is the problemOysters poached for five minutes will be tough and shrunken. Bring the liquor to a bare simmer, slip the oysters in, and lift them out the moment the edges ruffle and curl, roughly one to two minutes depending on size.
- Two gillsIn American measure a gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water. With the oysters' own liquor that gives a shallow bath of liquid in a wide pan.
- Hold back the saltHalf a teaspoon of salt on top of undiluted oyster liquor is generous by modern palates, and the hollandaise brings more. Taste the liquor first; many oysters need none at all.
- SautoirA sautoir is a wide, straight-sided shallow pan. Here it is used only as a warm mixing vessel, not for cooking, so any wide bowl or pan off the heat will do.
- Keep the sauce off the fireHollandaise breaks above about 160F. Combine the oysters and sauce away from direct heat, in a pan warmed but not hot, and toss gently rather than stirring, which tears the oysters.
- Dry the oysters properlyThe draining on sieve and cloth is not fussiness. Any clinging poaching liquid will thin the emulsion and pool at the bottom of the dish.
- YieldTwenty-four oysters serves four as a first course, or two as a light main with toast. Serve at once; the dish does not hold or reheat.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by a man who had spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe reads like a line cook's note to himself rather than a home instruction: no quantities for the sauce, no serving numbers, just the sequence. Oysters were cheap and abundant along the American Atlantic coast in the nineteenth century, sold by the barrel and eaten by every class, which is why cookbooks of the period carry dozens of oyster preparations where a modern book might carry two or three. Dressing them in hollandaise is the restaurant instinct at work: take a common ingredient and cloak it in a French sauce. The name hollandaise means simply "in the Dutch style," but why the sauce carries it is unsettled -- the connection to any actual Dutch dish is thin.