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Oysters, Poulette
Plunge forty-eight medium, freshly opened, fresh Bluepoint oysters with their liquor, into a pint boiling water with teaspoon salt, and boil for three minutes, drain on a sieve and save the liquor. Finely chop three sound shallots and place them in a saucepan with an ounce of butter and nicely brown for three minutes, stirring meanwhile, then add one ounce flour, stir well, pour in a gill white wine and half the quantity of the oyster broth, mix until it comes to a boil. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper, mix well, then let boil for fifteen minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Add the oysters, six sliced canned mushrooms, half teaspoon chives and two tablespoons sherry, lightly mix and cook for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks in half a gill cream, then strain it through a cheesecloth into the pan, carefully mix while heating for two minutes, pour the oysters into a chafing or deep dish and serve.
A classic sauce poulette — velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison — built on oysters and their own broth. The measurements are Edwardian professional shorthand, and the cooking times are the one thing worth ignoring.
- The hinge: the liaison must not boilOnce the yolks and cream go in, hold the pan below a simmer, around 175-180F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into curds and thin liquid. "Heating for two minutes" means heating gently until it coats a spoon.
- Oyster timingThe recipe cooks the oysters three times: three minutes boiling, five in the sauce, two more in the finish. Oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, roughly a minute in hot liquid. Poach them briefly to release their liquor, set them aside, and return them to the finished sauce only long enough to warm through.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So a gill of white wine, and a quarter cup of cream for the liaison. Half the quantity of oyster broth is a quarter cup — the poached liquor and the pint of poaching water combined will give you far more than that.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon. That is aggressive for a delicate cream sauce; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern taste, with more added at the end if wanted.
- BluepointsLong Island oysters, mild and medium-sized. Any small-to-medium eastern oyster works. Forty-eight shucked oysters is roughly a quart to a quart and a half, depending on size.
- Browning the shallots"Nicely brown" here means golden, not dark. Browned shallots plus flour makes a blond roux; take it too far and the sauce loses its pale ivory colour.
- Canned mushroomsCommon in kitchens of the period and still perfectly usable, but six sliced button mushrooms sweated in butter give better texture and no tinny note.
- YieldServes six as a first course, four as a main with rice or toast points. The recipe offers a chafing dish or simply a deep dish for serving.
Poulette is one of the old French mother-sauce derivatives: a velouté sharpened with lemon or wine, thickened at the last moment with egg yolks and cream, and traditionally scattered with parsley. The name comes from poule, the hen, and is generally traced to the sauce's use with boiled fowl and with dishes bound by yolks; it turns up most famously with mussels, tripe and sweetbreads. Applying it to oysters looks like an American gesture. In the decades either side of 1900 oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by the barrel, and hotel and club cooks in New York worked through the whole French repertoire with them — Bluepoints à la poulette, à la Newburg, en brochette. A book called The International Cook Book carrying such a recipe catches that moment exactly: a French sauce, an Atlantic bivalve, a can of mushrooms, and a chafing dish on the sideboard.