Oyster Dressing
Two tablespoonfuls flour, two tablespoonfuls butter; brown the butter and flour, add white stock, oyster liquor to make thin for gravy; boil, add one pint of oysters, chopped or whole; pepper and salt to taste.
This is a sauce rather than a stuffing — "dressing" in the game chapter of a turn-of-the-century book usually means something poured over roast or braised birds. It comes together in about ten minutes once the stock is at hand.
- The oysters go in last, brieflyThe oysters go in last -- The recipe adds them after the sauce has boiled. Modern practice is to cook them only until the edges ruffle and they are heated through; held at a hard simmer they tighten and leach their liquor into the sauce.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly gelatinous. Any good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; season at the end, since oyster liquor is already salty.
- Oyster liquorThe strained juice from the container or from shucking. Let it settle and pour off the clear part to leave grit behind. A pint of shucked oysters may yield anywhere from about half a cup to a cup of liquor, depending on how they were packed.
- "Brown the butter and flour"A blond-to-brown roux over medium heat, three to five minutes for a pale nut colour, longer for deeper. Two tablespoons of each will thicken roughly a cup and a half of liquid to gravy consistency.
- Proportions are left to the cookThe original gives no quantity of stock — add it gradually until the sauce coats a spoon but still pours, then thin with the oyster liquor. Expect a cup and a half to two cups of liquid in total.
- Whole or choppedChopped oysters distribute through the sauce and are easier to spoon over carved birds; whole ones make it more of a garnish. Either way, cut them after they are drained, not while cooking.
- YieldRoughly three to four cups all told (a pint of oysters plus a cup and a half to two cups of sauce), enough to serve a brace of small game birds or a roast duck.
Oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s use them the way later books use mushrooms — as a savoury extender for sauces, stuffings and soups rather than a luxury. Oysters turn up repeatedly alongside wild fowl and venison in period menus. The word "dressing" was still elastic at this date, covering both the bread mixture packed inside a bird and, as here, a thickened gravy served with it — a looseness that survives in salad dressing and in the regional argument over dressing versus stuffing.