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Oyster Loaves (With a sharp knife cut off)
With a sharp knife cut off the tops of six French rolls and scrape out the crumbs; brush inside and out with melted butter and set in the oven until crisp. Pick over and drain twenty-five large oysters; put them in a saucepan and shake over the fire until the gills ruffle; then drain again. Put the liquor drained from them into a cup and add sufficient rich milk (or cream) to measure three-quarters of a cupful. With this make a cream sauce, using one tablespoonful of butter, one large tablespoonful of flour, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, one quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper and a dash of mace. Simmer for three minutes, add the oysters and one-half of a teaspoonful of lemon juice; set over hot water for five minutes; fill the loaves, replace the covers and send at once to the table.
A straightforward creamed-oyster filling in a crisped roll. The only real difficulty is heat: everything here is designed to cook the oysters barely at all.
- The hinge: "until the gills ruffle"This is the entire technique. Shake the oysters in a dry-ish pan over moderate heat only until the frilled edge of the mantle curls and firms, roughly 1 to 2 minutes. Past that they tighten and go rubbery, and the five minutes over hot water at the end adds more cooking still.
- Oven for the rollsNo temperature is given. 375F for 8 to 10 minutes crisps buttered roll shells without browning them past the point of being pleasant to bite.
- French rollsFrench rolls of this period were generally small rolls rather than a large loaf; a modern petit pain, small ciabatta roll or a cut section of baguette all work. A soft supermarket dinner roll will collapse under the sauce.
- Twenty-five large oystersDepending on size, somewhere between a pint and a quart of shucked oysters with their liquor. The liquor drained from them is not expected to make up the whole three-quarter cupful; it is topped up with milk or cream to that measure.
- "Rich milk"Whole milk, or milk with a little cream. The proportion of 1 tablespoon butter to 1 large tablespoon flour to 3/4 cup liquid gives a sauce of medium body, thick enough to sit in the bread for a short while rather than soak straight through it.
- MaceGround mace is the outer covering of nutmeg — warmer and less sweet. Nutmeg substitutes acceptably at slightly less than the quantity; a dash means about 1/8 teaspoon.
- Pick over and drainRun the oysters through your fingers in their liquor to find shell fragments, then strain the liquor through a fine sieve or cloth before measuring it. Grit in a cream sauce is unrecoverable.
- Yield and timingSix loaves, so six as a light supper or first course. Assemble at the last possible moment — the instruction to "send at once to the table" is practical, not decorative, since the bread softens within minutes.
Oyster loaves belong to a long line of dishes in which a hollowed loaf serves as the dish itself, the bread absorbing sauce that would otherwise need a plate and a fork. In nineteenth-century America oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel, which is why they turn up in cookbooks of this period in every register from chafing-dish suppers to sandwich chapters like this one. The form is best known in New Orleans, where a fried-oyster version filling a loaf of bread is traditionally called la médiatrice, "the peacemaker," said to be the offering a late-returning husband brought home, though that story is folklore rather than documented history. The version here is a Northern, genteel treatment: no frying, a delicate cream sauce with mace and lemon, and the bread crisped in butter so it holds together long enough to reach the table.