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Scrambled Eggs with Oysters
Place eighteen freshly opened oysters with their own liquor in a saucepan with one gill water and three saltspoons salt. Let boil for three minutes, then skim froth off surface. Mix in a small saucepan a tablespoon melted butter with tablespoon flour, strain the oyster broth through a cloth into this pan, add one saltspoon cayenne pepper and mix continually on fire until it comes to a boil. Cut the oysters in quarters, add to the sauce, mix well, cook for one minute and keep hot.
Prepare plain scrambled eggs, dress half the quantity in a deep dish, pour oysters and sauce over, cover with balance scrambled eggs and serve.
A layered dish of soft scrambled eggs with a creamed oyster filling. The sauce is a small blond roux thinned with oyster broth rather than milk, so it depends entirely on not overcooking the oysters.
- The hinge: oyster timingOysters shrink and toughen fast. Poach them only until the edges ruffle, about a minute in the simmering liquor, then lift them out and reserve the broth; the three-minute boil in the original will leave them chewy. They get another minute in the sauce at the end, which is plenty.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. With the liquor from eighteen oysters that gives you roughly a cup of broth, which is the right amount for a tablespoon each of butter and flour.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and one saltspoon of cayenne is 1/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but not unreasonable for a cup of sauce. Taste before adding all of it, since cayenne varies in heat.
- Straining through a clothOyster liquor carries grit and shell fragments. A damp muslin or a coffee filter in a fine sieve does what the original cloth did; skipping it produces a sandy sauce.
- Buying oystersEighteen shucked oysters is one to one and a half cups, sold in tubs with their liquor at most fish counters. If your tub liquor is scant, top up with water rather than milk so the sauce stays clear-tasting.
- The scrambled eggsThe original gives no quantity or method, only 'plain scrambled eggs', presumably a recipe elsewhere in the book. As an estimate, eight to ten eggs cooked soft over low heat, pulled off the heat while still glossy; they will carry on setting under the hot oyster sauce.
- Yield and servingProbably four as a lunch or supper dish, though the original gives no yield. It cools quickly, so use a warmed deep dish as directed and take it to the table immediately.
Creamed oysters turn up constantly in American and Anglo-French cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when oysters were cheap and widely eaten rather than a luxury, and appeared at breakfast, in soups, in pies and folded into eggs. This layered treatment — eggs, filling, eggs — has the look of a restaurant presentation, and the sauce is textbook technique: a small roux moistened with the poaching liquor rather than cream, so the oyster flavour is not muffled.