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Pan Roast
Put into the handled dish a tablespoonful of butter; as it creams add a dozen oysters, a little salt and white pepper and half a pint of oyster liquor. Cover and cook two minutes. Put a thin slice of neatly trimmed toast on a hot breakfast plate, on it put six of the oysters, and sufficient liquid to moisten the toast and serve. For a party of four, double the quantities.
A chafing-dish breakfast dish, written for the blazer pan and meant to be cooked at the table. It is quick enough that everything should be ready before the butter goes in.
- The two minutes are the whole recipeOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and they plump. Longer boiling in the liquor shrinks them and turns them rubbery, so pull the pan as soon as the frills curl.
- "The handled dish"Most likely the blazer, the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set over its spirit lamp; the recipe itself says only "handled dish." Any wide, shallow skillet works; you want surface area so the dozen oysters sit in one layer.
- Half a pint of oyster liquorOne cup. That is more than a dozen shucked oysters will usually give up, so buy oysters in their liquor by the jar, or make up the difference with a little fish stock or water. This version keeps to butter and liquor only; adding milk or cream moves it toward a stew, though later pan roasts often do include cream.
- White pepper is deliberateBlack pepper specks show against pale oysters and liquor. The seasoning should be light in any case, since oyster liquor is already saline; salt at the end, after tasting.
- Butter that "creams"Foaming, not browning. Once the foam subsides and the milk solids color, the flavor turns nutty and fights the oysters.
- The toastCut thin, crusts trimmed, and toasted dry and firm rather than golden-soft, or it dissolves under the liquor. Warm the plates; this dish goes cold fast.
- YieldAs written, two servings of six oysters each. The doubling note gives four.
- SourcingUse oysters from a reputable supplier, refrigerated and within date. Briefly cooked shellfish is not for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease.
The pan roast belongs to the American oyster boom of the late nineteenth century, when rail and ice made Chesapeake and Long Island oysters a cheap staple as far inland as the Midwest, and cookbooks carried whole chapters of them: raw, fried, scalloped, in stews, in patties. "Roast" here is often said to preserve an older sense of the word, from oysters roasted in their shells over coals until they opened in their own liquor, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; the chafing-dish version keeps the principle of cooking the oyster in nothing but butter and its own juice while dispensing with the fire and the shells. Its place among the breakfast dishes is not an eccentricity of this book. Oysters at breakfast were unremarkable in 1900, and the chafing dish itself was then fashionable, prized for cooking small, quick dishes in front of the people eating them. The Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York, opened in 1913, still serves a pan roast, though its version is cream-based.