Oyster Sauce
Pick over and wash twenty-five good-sized oysters. Put in a saucepan with the strained liquor. Add one-half of a teaspoonful of anchovy sauce, the juice of one-half of a lemon and one blade of mace. Heat slowly and when it reaches the simmering point, stir in carefully one tablespoonful of butter, into which has been rubbed one tablespoonful of flour. Season and take from the fire as soon as thickened, remove the mace and stir in the second spoonful of butter. Serve with boiled fish.
A butter-and-flour thickened oyster sauce of the old Anglo-American school, meant to be spooned over a plain boiled fish. The whole thing takes about ten minutes and the only real risk is overcooking.
- The hinge: barely cook the oystersBring the liquor just to a simmer and pull the pan the moment the sauce thickens. Oysters are done when their edges ruffle, roughly two minutes; held at a simmer for a quarter hour they turn to erasers.
- Quantity of oystersTwenty-five "good-sized" shucked oysters is about a quart, or two 16-oz tubs of shucked oysters with their liquor. If your oysters are small, judge by volume rather than count.
- Strain the liquor properly"Pick over and wash" is the period instruction for removing shell fragments. Pour the liquor through a fine sieve or coffee filter; grit will otherwise carry straight into a smooth sauce with nowhere to hide.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled Victorian condiment, thinner than modern paste. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire, gives a similar background savor. Add it early so it dissolves.
- Blade of maceA blade is one whole piece of the lacy aril around a nutmeg, not the ground spice. If you only have ground mace, use a pinch and skip the removal step, though the flavor will be blunter.
- The butter and flourOne tablespoon each, kneaded cold into a paste, is a beurre manie rather than a roux; it thickens quickly with little cooking, so keep the sauce moving. The "second spoonful of butter" is an additional tablespoon stirred in off the heat for gloss, making two tablespoons of butter in all.
- Seasoning"Season" here means salt and pepper, and you should taste first. Oyster liquor plus anchovy is already salty; cayenne turns up as an addition in some period versions.
- YieldEnough for four to six servings over poached cod, haddock or halibut. It does not reheat well; make it while the fish rests.
Oyster sauce in this sense has nothing to do with the Cantonese bottled condiment; it is a standard nineteenth-century English accompaniment to boiled cod, turbot or fowl, and it survives in American cookbooks because oysters were cheap and shipped inland by the barrel. The pattern recurs across period books: oysters in their own liquor, a whisper of mace, a squeeze of lemon, thickened with kneaded butter and flour and finished with more butter. Bottled anchovy sauce, sold under names such as Burgess's, was a common shortcut to depth of flavor. A well-made oyster sauce was served with boiled poultry as often as with fish.