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Oyster Loaf
Take a stale loaf of good bread and with a sharp knife cut off the top; scrape out the greater portion of the crumbs and brush it thoroughly, inside and out, with melted butter. Brush the top with butter also, put both on a pan and set in a hot oven until nicely crisped. Pick over and drain forty good-sized oysters and thoroughly dry each on a cloth. Dip them singly into slightly beaten egg seasoned highly with salt and pepper and roll in well dried bread crumbs. Let stand for half an hour, then egg and crumb them a second time. Make a cream sauce with two tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of flour and one and one-half cupfuls of cream or rich milk; season with salt and pepper, simmer for five minutes, add one heaping tablespoonful of chopped parsley, ten drops of onion juice and one teaspoonful of lemon juice and set over hot water. Immerse the oysters, a few at a time, in smoking hot fat until all are cooked a golden brown. Arrange them in the hot loaf and serve quickly.
A hollowed loaf filled with fried oysters, with a parsley cream sauce made alongside. The whole thing hinges on timing: everything must be hot and dry at the same moment, or the crust steams and collapses.
- The loafA stale, firm-crumbed white loaf works; a soft supermarket sandwich loaf will tear when scraped. Leave a wall of crumb about half an inch thick so it holds its shape once filled.
- Hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'a hot oven' in period sources is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. Ten to fifteen minutes should crisp the shell and lid; watch the buttered edges, which colour first.
- How many oystersForty large shucked oysters is somewhere between a quart and a quart and a half, liquor included, depending on size. Drain them well and blot each one - surface moisture is what makes breading slide off in the fat.
- Double breadingThe half-hour rest between the two coats is not filler. It lets the first layer hydrate and set so the second grips, giving a shell that survives frying and the trip to the table.
- Frying'smoking hot fat' is usually read today as around 375F. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds; breaded oysters generally need only a minute or so to reach golden brown. Longer and they shrink and toughen.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. Ten drops is a seasoning, not a flavour base — it was a common way to get onion without visible pieces in a white sauce.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1.5 cups cream gives a light, pourable sauce on the thin side of medium, yielding about 1.5 cups. Setting it over hot water rather than direct heat keeps it from scorching or forming a skin while the oysters fry.
- Assembly and yieldThe recipe does not say where the sauce goes; pass it separately or spoon a little into the loaf just before the lid goes on, since sauce sitting under the oysters will soften the crust. One loaf serves four as a main course, more if cut into thick slices.
The oyster loaf belongs to a family of hollowed-bread dishes that turn up across nineteenth-century American cookery, and its best-known form is the New Orleans version — often called the "peacemaker," traditionally said to be the loaf a late-returning husband brought home to his wife, and often said to be an ancestor of the fried oyster po'boy. Its appearance among sandwiches is a reminder of how broadly that word could be used: a sandwich was anything served in or between bread, not necessarily two flat slices. The recipe also reflects how cheap and plentiful oysters still were in this period, when barrels of them moved inland by rail and forty large ones were an unremarkable quantity for a family supper — the extravagance here is the cream, the double egging and the deep fat, not the shellfish.