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Creamed Oysters
To prepare oysters in a chafing dish for a party of four, have three dozen oysters freshly opened. The sweet Blue Points are fully as nice as the large "saddle-rocks," but four dozen oysters should be allowed to four persons if smaller ones are used. Melt a large tablespoonful of butter in the chafing dish. Add the oysters without their juice, but with a little salt and white pepper; let them cook three minutes, stirring them often; then add a scant tablespoonful of flour, stirring it into the butter in the bottom of the dish. Add a cup of cream, and when the mixture boils serve with a salad of green lettuce or celery, and with the thinnest slices of bread, buttered and made into the form of sandwiches. Tender Little Neck clams are delicious cooked in this way. Sweetbreads of veal, properly blanched and boiled until tender, make an excellent chafing-dish stew.
A chafing-dish stew of the kind served at late suppers and informal breakfasts, cooked at the table over a spirit lamp. It works just as well in a heavy saucepan or skillet, provided you keep the heat low and your eye on the oysters.
- The hinge: stop when the edges ruffleThree minutes is the outside limit, and only over the gentle heat of a chafing dish. Oysters are done the moment their edges curl and they plump; past that they tighten into rubber and weep liquid into the sauce.
- Chafing dish or skilletA chafing dish is a shallow pan over a water bath or spirit flame, so its heat is mild and indirect. In a saucepan over gas or induction, work over low to medium-low heat or the flour will catch before the cream goes in.
- QuantitiesThree dozen shucked oysters for four is roughly 1 to 1.5 pints of shucked meats, depending on size. Modern shucked oysters are usually sold by the half-pint or pint container rather than the count.
- Blue Points and saddle-rocksBlue Points are Long Island oysters, still sold under that name; "saddle-rock" was a nineteenth-century New York market name for a large oyster and has effectively vanished. Any medium-to-large oyster serves; buy larger ones and the three-dozen count holds.
- Drain them, and keep the liquorAdding the oysters without their juice keeps the sauce from thinning and going grey. The liquor is worth saving to loosen the finished stew if the cream reduces too far, or for a soup.
- The flourA scant tablespoon of flour to a tablespoon of butter and a cup of cream gives a barely thickened sauce, not a chowder. Stir it into the fat in the bottom of the pan and let it cook through for a minute before the cream goes in, or the sauce tastes raw.
- Bring to a boil, then offThe cream needs to reach a boil to thicken, but hold it there only a few seconds. Extended boiling with the oysters already in the pan undoes the careful three minutes.
- The variationsLittle Neck clams behave much like oysters and need the same short cooking. Veal sweetbreads must be soaked, blanched and peeled of membrane before they are simmered tender, which is an hour or two of work ahead of the chafing dish, not a substitution you can make on the spot.
- ServingFour generous breakfast or supper portions. The thin buttered bread sandwiches are the point as much as the salad; they soak up the sauce without competing with it.
Chafing-dish cookery was something close to a craze in America in the 1890s and early 1900s, and cookbooks of the period devoted whole chapters to it: the dish sat on a sideboard or the table itself, and the host cooked in front of the guests. Oysters suited it perfectly, being cheap, abundant along the Atlantic coast, and needing only minutes of heat. The named varieties here are of their period — Blue Points from Long Island's Great South Bay were the everyday standard, while "saddle-rock" was a New York market term for a very large oyster, a name that had faded from use by the mid-twentieth century as the New York beds declined.