Home › Sandwiches › Oyster Loaves (Pick over and drain fifty)
Oyster Loaves (Pick over and drain fifty)
Pick over and drain fifty small oysters. Put them in a saucepan with one tablespoonful of butter, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne and the same of paprika, half of a teaspoonful of lemon juice. Cover closely and shake over the fire until the oysters are plump and the gills curled. Drain and set aside. Measure the liquor thus obtained and add sufficient cream to make one and onequarter cupfuls. In a saucepan put one tablespoonful of butter and one heaping tablespoonful of flour, and stir together over the fire until mixed frothy. Add the measured liquid and stir until thickened. Season to taste and simmer for five minutes. Add the oysters and one teaspoonful of parsley, chopped very fine, and set over hot water for five minutes. Have ready eight or ten small French rolls, which have been prepared by cutting off the tops, scraping out the crumbs, brushing inside and out with melted butter and placing in a hot oven until crisp. Fill these with the prepared oysters, cover with the tops, which were laid aside and serve.
A creamed-oyster filling in a crisped bread shell, from the era when the oyster was cheap enough to count out fifty at a time. Nothing here is difficult, but the oysters are unforgiving of an extra minute.
- The hinge: stop as soon as the edges ruffleOysters are done when they plump and the frilled edge curls, which over decent heat takes about two minutes and no more. They then sit in hot sauce and finish there; anything longer and they tighten into erasers.
- Fifty small oystersCounts vary by grading, but small shucked oysters run roughly 30-40 to the pint, so fifty is somewhere between a pint and a pint and a half. Buy shucked oysters in their liquor rather than shell stock unless you want the shucking.
- The liquor and creamThe oysters release liquid as they cook; drain it, measure, and top up with cream to reach 1 1/4 cups. If your oysters were packed dry you may be adding almost all cream, which makes a richer, less briny sauce — a splash of bottled clam juice restores the balance.
- "Mixed frothy"That is a blond roux: butter and flour cooked together until it bubbles and smells nutty, maybe a minute, with no colour taken. One heaping tablespoon of flour to 1 1/4 cups liquid gives a sauce that just coats the spoon.
- A hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. The hollowed rolls want ten minutes or so, until the buttered interior is dry and browned — this is what keeps the crumb from turning to paste under the sauce.
- French rollsSmall crusty rolls, not soft dinner rolls. A firm crust is structural here; supermarket brioche or potato rolls will collapse. Save the scraped-out crumb for breadcrumbs.
- Set over hot waterA double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water, used to hold the filling hot without letting it boil. Boiling would both toughen the oysters and risk breaking the cream sauce.
- YieldEight to ten loaves, which is a light supper for four or a first course for eight. Assemble at the last minute; filled shells soften quickly.
Oyster loaves belong to the long American stretch when oysters were poor people's food as much as rich people's — dredged by the barrel from the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound and the Gulf, shipped inland on ice by rail, and eaten in every form the nineteenth-century kitchen could devise. The hollowed-and-crisped bread shell is an old trick with a wide family: the same idea produces the New Orleans "oyster loaf", sometimes said to be an ancestor of the po' boy, and turns up in English cookery as a shape for creamed fish or sweetbreads. Its placement in a sandwich chapter is telling — for a Twentieth Century Cook Book audience this was food for a chafing-dish supper, a card party or a late evening at home, portable enough to eat from the hand and grand enough to serve to guests. Oyster stocks collapsed through the twentieth century, and a recipe that opens by counting out fifty of them reads now as a small record of how abundant they once were.