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Oysters, Vaudeville
Procure from your fish dealer thirty-six fresh Bluepoint oysters, opened. Plunge them into a saucepan containing half pint boiling water with half teaspoon salt. Cover the pan and boil the oysters for five minutes, then strain through a strainer. Place in another saucepan six medium, finely chopped shallots with one ounce butter and slowly cook on a moderate fire for five minutes without browning, stirring well meanwhile. Then add three tablespoons sifted flour. Stir well with a whisk until well heated, then pour in half pint hot milk. Mix again with the whisk until it boils. Now add the oysters with two tablespoons of their own juice, two tablespoons sherry, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and half teaspoon salt. Gently mix the whole well together with the wooden spoon and boil for two and a half minutes. Remove the pan from the fire, place it on a table, add, little by little, three-quarters of an ounce butter, continually mixing while adding it. Pour into a hot dish and serve.
A creamed oyster dish in the Delmonico's manner: a shallot velouté finished with butter off the heat. The one thing to change is the oyster cooking, which as written is roughly ten times too long.
- The oysters are the hingeFive minutes at a boil, then a further two and a half in the sauce, will leave Bluepoints shrunken and rubbery. Poach them in the salted water only until the edges ruffle, 30 to 60 seconds, lift them out, and return them to the finished sauce just long enough to heat through.
- Save the poaching liquorThe recipe calls for two tablespoons of the oysters' "own juice" but says only to strain them, without telling you to keep the liquid. Keep the strained liquor; use it for the two tablespoons, and reduce a little more of it into the sauce if you want a stronger oyster flavour.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; three-quarters of an ounce is about 1 1/2 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for one cup of milk — start with an eighth.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern burner, medium-low. The shallots must sweat translucent without colour, or the sauce takes on a tan cast and a fried-onion note that fights the oysters.
- The rouxThree tablespoons flour to two tablespoons butter is a dry, flour-heavy roux by current practice; it will look crumbly. Cook it a full two minutes before the milk goes in so the raw flour taste is gone, and expect a thick sauce that the oyster liquor and sherry will loosen.
- Mounting the butter"Remove the pan from the fire, place it on a table" is monter au beurre. The sauce must stay below a simmer while the cold butter goes in a piece at a time, or it will break and go greasy.
- ShallotsSix medium shallots means six cloves, not six whole heads — roughly a scant half cup chopped. Modern banana shallots are larger; three or four will do.
- ServingThirty-six oysters serves four generously as a first course, or three as a lunch dish. The recipe directs it into a hot dish to be served at once; it does not hold or reheat well.
The International Cook Book came out of the world of Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it carries hundreds of dishes named after people, theatres and places in the way restaurant kitchens of the period habitually named things — a garnish and a title being cheaper to invent than a new technique. "Vaudeville" here looks to be a house name rather than a description; no particular dish or performer has been traced behind it, only the fashion for borrowing glamour from the stage. The oysters themselves place it: Bluepoints, originally from Blue Point on Long Island's Great South Bay, were by this period a well-known market name in the east. The treatment is straight French kitchen practice — sweated shallots, a white roux, milk, sherry, cayenne, and butter whisked in off the fire — applied to an American shellfish, which is roughly what the book's title promises.