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Oysters, Villeroi
Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons butter with two tablespoons flour; pour in two gills milk, season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding half ounce finely chopped, cooked lean ham, half ounce finely chopped, cooked beef tongue, two chopped canned mushrooms, half a finely chopped truffle, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half teaspoon chopped chives. Mix well with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil and let cook for five minutes; shift the pan to a corner of the range.
Thoroughly wipe twenty-four large, fresh-opened oysters, then plunge them into the sauce; place the pan on the table and let stand for five minutes, lift up one by one with a larding needle, arrange one beside another on a lightly buttered tin and let cool off. Roll in flour, then dip in beaten egg and gently roll in fresh bread crumbs. Arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for five minutes, remove, thoroughly drain, dredge half a teaspoon salt over them and dress on a dish with folded napkin. Decorate with six quarters lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A classic à la Villeroi treatment: oysters cloaked in a thick, heavily garnished béchamel, chilled until the coating sets, then breaded and deep-fried. Most of the work is in getting the sauce right.
- The hinge: chill until firm"Let cool off" is doing a great deal of work here. The sauce jacket must set hard — an hour in the refrigerator, or twenty minutes in the freezer — or it will slide off the oyster the moment it hits the flour. Bread them straight from the cold.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of milk. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are a quarter teaspoon each — the cayenne at that level is assertive against a cup of sauce.
- The sauce must be very thickA cup of milk to one and a half tablespoons butter and two tablespoons flour is nearer a medium bechamel than a setting jacket, so it will need reducing to cling. If it looks loose after the five minutes of cooking, keep it on the heat; it needs to coat the back of the spoon heavily.
- "A corner of the range"On a coal range, the cool edge of the stovetop. Read it as the lowest burner setting, or simply off the heat — the oysters are not meant to cook in the sauce, only to be coated and to warm through.
- Frying time and temperature"Boiling fat" is period shorthand for fat hot enough to seize the crumb, in practice somewhere around 350-375F. Five minutes at that heat will scorch the crumbs and toughen the oysters; two to three minutes, until deep gold, is closer to what is wanted, bearing in mind the oysters and their sauce jacket go in cold.
- Larding needleUse a fork, a skewer or two toothpicks to lift each coated oyster onto the buttered tray without stripping the sauce.
- Truffle and canned mushroomsThe half truffle is optional at current prices; a teaspoon of truffle paste, or simply another chopped mushroom, keeps the balance. Canned mushrooms were a common pantry item when this was written -- drained sauteed cremini are closer to what the sauce wants.
- Ham and tongueHalf an ounce of each is a tablespoon or two chopped. Cooked beef tongue is a deli-counter item in some cities and absent elsewhere; prosciutto or a good boiled ham for both will not offend the dish.
- YieldTwenty-four oysters serves four as a first course, or two as a main. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop below temperature, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
Sauce Villeroi — a béchamel or velouté reduced until it will coat and set, enriched with a fine salpicon of ham, tongue, mushroom and truffle — is one of the workhorse preparations of the French repertoire, traditionally credited to the kitchens of the Villeroy family, marshals and courtiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though the attribution is the usual sort of culinary legend rather than anything documented. What matters is the technique it names: anything à la Villeroi is masked in that stiff sauce, chilled, crumbed and fried, so the diner bites through a crust into a pocket of hot sauce around sweetbread, chicken wing, or here an oyster. The dish belongs squarely to the American restaurant French of the turn of the century, when oysters were cheap and abundant on both coasts and the ambition of a kitchen was measured by how much Parisian machinery it could bring to bear on them.