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Oysters, Moreno
Open twenty-four large, fresh oysters, detach but keep them on their deep shells, place them on a roasting pan and season with a half teaspoon salt equally divided. Finely chop four Spanish sweet peppers and sprinkle them over the oysters, also equally divided. Arrange a thin piece raw, lean bacon on top of each oyster, sprinkle two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs over them, then set in the oven for ten minutes, remove, arrange on a dish, decorate with a little parsley and serve.
A short, forgiving dish, but the original assumes a coal range and a cook who shucks by reflex. Two details need pinning down: the oven heat, which is never stated, and the bacon, which must be cut thin enough to render in the same ten minutes the oysters take.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat this as a quick oven, 450F, with the pan on an upper rack; a moderate oven will leave the bacon flabby and overcook the oysters while you wait for it.
- The bacon is the hingeCut it as thin as you can and no larger than the oyster it sits on. Thick modern bacon will not render in ten minutes, and extending the time turns the oysters to rubber. Some cooks part-render the slices for a minute first and finish them here.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are pimientos, the round mild red peppers, often available in 1906 imported canned or jarred in oil. Jarred pimientos, drained and patted dry, are the closest thing; a fresh red bell pepper works but gives a rawer, less sweet result.
- Keeping the shells levelThe recipe says only a roasting pan. A bed of coarse rock salt or crumpled foil holds the deep shells upright so the liquor stays in.
- Detach but keep on the shellCut the adductor muscle free from the deep shell so the oyster lifts cleanly with a fork at the table, then settle it back into its own liquor. Skipping this makes the dish awkward to eat.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon across twenty-four oysters is barely a pinch each, and correctly so. Oyster liquor and bacon both carry salt; do not add more.
- Breadcrumbs"Fresh" here means soft crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried or packaged crumbs, which will scorch at this heat before the bacon renders.
- YieldTwenty-four oysters serves four generously as a first course, or six as a passed hot appetizer.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906). Filippini spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and the book's habit of attaching a surname to a dish is a restaurant convention rather than a folk one: a garnish or treatment gets a name, and thereafter the name stands for the formula. "Moreno" is simply a Spanish surname, and the dish sits in a broad family of late-Victorian and Edwardian baked oysters, cousin to Oysters Rockefeller and to the bacon-wrapped angels on horseback, all of them ways of serving oysters hot at a time when American oysters were cheap, enormously abundant, and eaten by the barrel. Within a generation the Chesapeake and New York beds were in serious decline, and oysters shifted from everyday food to occasion food, which is roughly where they have stayed.