Home › Breakfast Dishes › Curry of Oysters
Curry of Oysters
Put an ounce of butter in the handled dish; when it foams add a teaspoonful of dry curry powder. When in danger of burning add a gill of oyster liquid. Dissolve a teaspoonful of flour in a gill of cold water; add this to the dish and stir with a spoon until thick. Add a dozen large oysters to the sauce and a saltspoonful of salt; mix the oysters well with the sauce for two minutes, cover and move the handle of the dish from right to left a moment and serve six oysters to each person.
A chafing-dish breakfast dish that comes together in under ten minutes. The original timing is unusually sound for its era, and the main work of translation is in the vessels and the volumes.
- The handled dishMost likely the chafing dish or blazer pan, given the instruction to swing it by the handle rather than stir; the recipe itself does not name the vessel. Any small heavy skillet or saucepan does the same work on a low burner.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe uses two of them: one of oyster liquor and one of cold water for the flour slurry, giving a cup of thin sauce for a dozen oysters.
- An ounce of butter, a saltspoonful of saltTwo tablespoons of butter; a saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Taste before adding the salt, since oyster liquor is already saline and a shucked pint can be brinier still.
- Oyster liquidThe liquor that comes in the container with shucked oysters, strained through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch shell grit. If a dozen oysters do not yield half a cup, top it up with bottled clam juice or water rather than more brine.
- Blooming the curry powderThe hinge of the recipe. Frying the powder briefly in foaming butter cooks off the raw, dusty edge of the spices; "when in danger of burning" means the moment it smells fragrant and starts to darken, and the liquid goes in then. Commercial curry powders of the period generally leaned on turmeric and coriander, often with fenugreek, so a mild supermarket blend is reasonably close in character.
- Two minutes and no moreThe instruction is right and worth honouring. Oysters are done when the edges ruffle and they plump; held longer over heat they tighten and turn rubbery. Add them off the boil, keep the sauce at a bare simmer, and serve immediately.
- The flour slurryCold water is specified so the flour disperses without lumping. Whisk it smooth before it goes in, and let the sauce cook a minute after it thickens to lose the pasty taste of raw flour.
- YieldSix oysters each, so two servings. Doubling works, but cook in two batches or the pan cools and the oysters stew rather than heat through.
Curried oysters belong to the long Anglo-American habit of treating curry powder as a breakfast seasoning, inherited from British India by way of kedgeree and devilled kidneys and carried into American cookbooks. Commercial curry powder was by then a shelf staple, sold ready-blended in tins, which is why the recipe can call for "a teaspoonful of dry curry powder" without further comment. The chafing dish is the other period marker: at the turn of the century it was fashionable enough to have its own cookbooks, prized for letting a hostess cook a small hot dish at the table without a servant, and oysters, cheap and abundant along the Atlantic seaboard before the great beds were fished out, were among its subjects.