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Pan-Roast Oysters
Lightly butter six individual shirred egg dishes. Place a toast two inches in diameter in each dish. Lay six good-sized freshly opened oysters on the toast. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Pour the liquor on the oysters around the dish and spread three tablespoons bread crumbs over them. Divide half ounce butter and place it in little pieces over the top of each; place in the oven to bake for ten minutes, or till a nice brown colour. Remove and serve.
A first-course oyster gratin, six small dishes to the batch. The original gives no oven temperature and its seasoning quantities are ambiguous, so a little arithmetic is needed before you start.
- Shirred egg dishesSmall, shallow, straight-sided ceramic or glass dishes about four to five inches across, sold now as egg or gratin dishes. Individual ramekins that are too deep will steam the oysters rather than brown them.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. To get "a nice brown colour" in ten minutes the oven needs to be hot, somewhere in the region of 425-450F, with the dishes high enough that the crumbs colour before the oysters tighten.
- Watch the ten minutesOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they plump. Ten minutes is the outside limit for large ones in a hot oven; smaller oysters will be firm and shrunken well before that, so judge by the crumbs browning, not the clock.
- How much seasoning, and whereHalf a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of paprika read as the total for all six dishes, which is right: about a pinch of each per dish. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon, again for the whole batch, so the dots on top are small. Use a little more if you want the crumbs properly gilded.
- The liquorStrain the oyster liquor through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch shell grit. The recipe's wording ("pour the liquor on the oysters around the dish") is ambiguous, but bringing it in around the oysters rather than tipping it over the top keeps the crumbs from washing flat.
- The toastCut two-inch rounds with a plain cutter from good white bread, toasted dry and firm. Its job is to absorb the liquor without turning to paste, so toast it well past pale.
- Buying oystersThirty-six shucked oysters, which for good-sized ones is roughly a quart, though counts vary with grade. Freshly shucked from the shell is best because you get the liquor with them; tubbed oysters are packed in their own liquor and will work, but drain and taste it first.
- YieldSix servings as a first course. Serve immediately, in the dishes, on plates with napkins under them since the dishes come out very hot.
"Pan roast" is an American oyster-house term that covers more than one thing: at oyster counters it has meant oysters cooked fast in a steam-jacketed kettle with butter and cream and poured over toast, while in cookbooks the name is also attached to a small baked dish of this sort, oysters on toast under crumbs and butter. Both versions share the toast, which soaks up the liquor the oysters give off. Recipes like this one belong to the long stretch from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth when oysters were cheap, plentiful and eaten in enormous quantity in eastern American cities, before overharvesting and pollution thinned the beds. The paprika may also be a marker of the period: paprika turns up often in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s in places where cayenne might once have been used.