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Oysters in Shell, Anglaise
Open twenty-four large fresh oysters, remove eyes and leave oysters on the deep shells, lay in a roasting pan, season all around with teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Evenly pour two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce over, arrange a small, thin slice raw lean bacon over each oyster, sprinkle a little bread crumbs over all, set in oven for ten minutes, remove, dress on a hot dish, decorate with six quarters lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A baked half-shell oyster in the English manner, essentially the same idea as angels on horseback with the bacon left flat instead of wrapped. The original assumes a coal range and a cook who shucks by the dozen, so the two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and how to keep the shells upright.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only "set in oven for ten minutes." A hot oven, around 450F, suits a bake this short, but the figure is a modern inference and not something the original states or implies by any named heat.
- Bacon is the timing problemModern bacon is wetter and more thickly sliced than the "small, thin slice raw lean bacon" intended here. Cut it very thin and small, or give it a brief turn in a dry pan first, because oysters are done in eight to ten minutes and bacon left to render from raw in that window comes out flabby.
- "Remove eyes"Usually read as detaching the adductor muscle so the oyster sits loose in the deep shell, and picking off any bits of shell. It does not refer to an anatomical eye; adult oysters have none.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is a lot for two dozen oysters, and the full teaspoon of salt is more than most modern palates want given that oyster liquor and Worcestershire are both salty. Halve the salt and taste.
- Keeping the shells levelLine the roasting pan with a bed of coarse rock salt or crumpled foil and nest each shell in it. Otherwise the shells tip and the liquor, which is most of the flavour, runs out into the pan.
- CrumbsUse dry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and only a light dusting. Fresh crumbs absorb the liquor and go pasty in the short bake.
- YieldTwenty-four oysters serves four as a first course, or two as a light supper with bread. The original calls for six lemon quarters, but that is a garnish count and need not indicate the number of portions.
"Anglaise" here simply marks the treatment as English: bacon, Worcestershire sauce and browned crumbs, the three things a French-trained chef of the period reached for when signalling British taste. The oyster section is where those labels show most clearly, since the same shellfish appears variously as Anglaise, Bordelaise, Poulette and so on with only the garnish changed. The bacon-and-oyster pairing is the same one behind angels on horseback, a savoury generally traced to English dinner tables of the later nineteenth century, where a small hot mouthful closed the meal after the sweet. Oysters at the time this book was compiled were still cheap and abundant on the American East Coast, which is why a recipe opens casually with two dozen of them.