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Panned Oysters
Into the dish put thirty washed and drained oysters, two tablespoonfuls of butter, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt and two drops of tabasco sauce. Cover closely, then light the lamp. Open and stir quickly about twice a minute. As soon as the oysters are plump and the gills curled, they are done. Extinguish the light and serve.
This is a chafing-dish recipe: "the dish" is the blazer pan, and "light the lamp" means the spirit burner underneath. Everything hinges on stopping the moment the edges ruffle.
- Translate the equipmentAny wide, heavy skillet or saut he over low-to-medium heat. Direct heat is fine: the blazer pan of a chafing dish sat straight over the flame, the hot-water pan being reserved for gentler dishes.
- The hinge: two to three minutes"Plump and the gills curled" happens fast, usually within two or three minutes of steady heat. Past that the oysters shrink, weep and turn rubbery, and no amount of butter recovers them.
- Drain them properly"Washed and drained" matters more than it sounds; excess water thins the butter and the oysters' own liquor.
- Salt with restraintA quarter teaspoon is right for well-drained oysters, but the liquor they give up is already saline. Taste at the end rather than adding more at the start.
- Two drops of tabascoTwo drops across thirty oysters is a whisper; keep it there and let the butter carry the dish.
- Yield and servingThirty oysters makes a light dish for about four. Spoon them with their buttery pan juices onto hot buttered toast and eat immediately .
- BuyingAsk for shucked oysters in their liquor, roughly a pint to a pint and a half for thirty, depending on size. Refrigerate and use the day you buy them.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American middle-class homes around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period devoted whole chapters to it: a spirit lamp, a pan and a tablecloth let a hostess cook at the table without a servant, which was part of the appeal. Oysters were one of the subjects such chapters returned to, being cheap, abundant along the Atlantic coast and quick enough to cook in front of an audience — "panned" simply means cooked in their own juices with butter rather than breaded, fried or stewed in milk. Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the 1860s, turns up here as a drop of heat, and its appearance alongside a chafing lamp places the book firmly in its era.