Home › A Calendar of Dinners › March 25
March 25
Menu: Scallop Chowder; Boiled Cod, Oyster Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Stewed Corn; Watercress, French Dressing; Cheese Biscuits Ginger Pudding; Coffee Boiled Cod-Wash the fish (about 2 to 3 pounds cod), and put into a fish-kettle, containing enough boiling water to cover it. Add some salt, bring quickly to boil; then draw pan to side of fire, and let it stay in hot water until cooked. Do not let water boil or simmer again. Cod cooked in this way has a much finer flavor than if it is allowed to simmer or boil. Take up fish on drainer, slide it on to a hot dish on a folded napkin, and serve garnished with sprigs of crisp parsley. Send to table with oyster sauce, which is made as follows: 4 tablespoons Crisco, 6 tablespoons flour, 1 small onion, 1/2 carrot, 12 whole peppers, 1/2 bay leaf, 1 clove, 1 bouquet garni, small blade mace, salt, and ten oysters. Peel the onion, scrape carrot; put them into saucepan with bay leaf, whole pepper, bouquet garni, and clove; add milk, and bring to boil. When milk boils take out mace and bay leaf. Melt Crisco in small saucepan; mix in flour smoothly; whisk into this hot milk. Stir until it boils, then let it simmer from 10 to 15 minutes. Take out bouquet; rub sauce through a sieve. Take 10 oysters and their liquor and put into a saucepan and bring to boiling point. Then take the oysters and cut each in quarters. Heat the sauce and add the oyster liquor, reduce well, strain and return to saucepan; stir in 1 yolk of egg, bind, and then add oysters and lemon juice. Stir till hot, but it must not boil. Season to taste and serve.
This is the tail end of a printed page, so the opening — the roux, stock and vegetables that make the base — is missing. What survives is the finishing of an oyster sauce, and the finishing is the part where it can be ruined.
- What you are missingThe recipe begins on the previous page, and the surviving text implies a strained white sauce base flavoured with a bouquet. The nature of that base and its quantity are not recoverable from what is printed here; read the surviving text as instructions for finishing an already-made white sauce.
- BouquetA bouquet here is a bundle of parsley, thyme and bay tied with string, dropped in to flavour the sauce and pulled out whole. It is not an ingredient to be sieved through.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolkOnce the egg yolk goes in, the sauce must stay well below a simmer, as the recipe says. Boil it and the yolk scrambles into threads and the sauce breaks. Take the pan off the burner before the yolk goes in and return it to low heat.
- Oysters need seconds, not minutes"Bring to boiling point" means exactly that and no longer: the moment the edges ruffle, lift them out. Oysters held at a boil turn to rubber, and these are going back into a hot sauce afterwards, which cooks them further.
- Use the liquorThe oyster liquor is the seasoning in this sauce. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth first — shell grit settles in it — then reduce it hard with the sauce to concentrate the flavour before the yolk goes in.
- QuarteringThe recipe cuts each oyster in four; no reason is given, though quartering distributes them through the sauce and makes them easier to serve. Small oysters can be halved instead.
- Season lastReducing oyster liquor concentrates its salt considerably. Taste only at the end, after the yolk and lemon, before adding any salt.
- Yield and servingThe quantity of base is not given in the surviving text, so the yield cannot be worked out. It is a sauce for poached or boiled fish, boiled fowl, or steamed vegetables, not a dish on its own.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, with recipes by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal; it included a calendar of dinners giving a menu for every day of the year, each one built around the company's new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, which had gone on sale in 1911. The commercial point of a book like this was to prove that the new fat could do everything butter and lard did, including stand in as the fat in a classical French sauce — which is what the missing first half of this recipe may well have called for. Egg-yolk-bound oyster sauce itself is older than the book: it descends from the English and Anglo-French repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when oysters were cheap and plentiful and were used as a flavouring for plain boiled fish and fowl rather than treated as a luxury. March falls within the traditional oyster season, the months with an R in them.
This is the tail end of a printed page, so the opening — the roux, stock and vegetables that make the base — is missing. What survives is the finishing of an oyster sauce, and the finishing is the part where it can be ruined.
- What you are missingThe recipe begins on the previous page, and the surviving text implies a strained white sauce base flavoured with a bouquet. The nature of that base and its quantity are not recoverable from what is printed here; read the surviving text as instructions for finishing an already-made white sauce.
- BouquetA bouquet here is a bundle of parsley, thyme and bay tied with string, dropped in to flavour the sauce and pulled out whole. It is not an ingredient to be sieved through.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolkOnce the egg yolk goes in, the sauce must stay well below a simmer, as the recipe says. Boil it and the yolk scrambles into threads and the sauce breaks. Take the pan off the burner before the yolk goes in and return it to low heat.
- Oysters need seconds, not minutes"Bring to boiling point" means exactly that and no longer: the moment the edges ruffle, lift them out. Oysters held at a boil turn to rubber, and these are going back into a hot sauce afterwards, which cooks them further.
- Use the liquorThe oyster liquor is the seasoning in this sauce. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth first — shell grit settles in it — then reduce it hard with the sauce to concentrate the flavour before the yolk goes in.
- QuarteringThe recipe cuts each oyster in four; no reason is given, though quartering distributes them through the sauce and makes them easier to serve. Small oysters can be halved instead.
- Season lastReducing oyster liquor concentrates its salt considerably. Taste only at the end, after the yolk and lemon, before adding any salt.
- Yield and servingThe quantity of base is not given in the surviving text, so the yield cannot be worked out. It is a sauce for poached or boiled fish, boiled fowl, or steamed vegetables, not a dish on its own.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, with recipes by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal; it included a calendar of dinners giving a menu for every day of the year, each one built around the company's new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, which had gone on sale in 1911. The commercial point of a book like this was to prove that the new fat could do everything butter and lard did, including stand in as the fat in a classical French sauce — which is what the missing first half of this recipe may well have called for. Egg-yolk-bound oyster sauce itself is older than the book: it descends from the English and Anglo-French repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when oysters were cheap and plentiful and were used as a flavouring for plain boiled fish and fowl rather than treated as a luxury. March falls within the traditional oyster season, the months with an R in them.