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Roast Oysters
Open the oysters and roast them in a dripping pan in their own liquor on the lower shell. These should be seasoned with butter, salt and pepper before sending to table. Serve with lemon or pepper sauce.
A bare-bones instruction of the kind common in turn-of-the-century books, where the author assumed the cook knew what an oyster looked like when it was done. The gaps worth filling are heat, time and the shucking.
- The hinge: watch the edges, not the clockOysters are done the moment the frilled edge curls and the liquor bubbles at the rim of the shell. Past that they tighten into rubber, and no amount of butter recovers them.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A hot oven of 450F is right for this: you want the shell contents to come up fast, roughly 5 to 8 minutes for medium oysters, before the liquor boils away.
- Dripping panA shallow rimmed roasting or sheet pan. Crumple foil or spread a bed of coarse salt across it so the deep shells sit level and the liquor stays put.
- "On the lower shell"The deep, cupped half. Shuck the oysters, cut the muscle free from the flat top shell, discard it, and leave the oyster loose in its own juice on the cup. An oyster knife and a folded towel are the whole kit.
- Pepper sauceIn this period the term generally meant a thin vinegar infused with hot peppers rather than a thick modern chile sauce. Any vinegar-based hot sauce serves, as does a plain mignonette of shallot in red wine vinegar.
- Seasoning orderThe recipe seasons after roasting, which is correct here. Salt drawn across a raw oyster pulls out the liquor you are trying to keep.
- SourcingBuy oysters live, with shells tightly closed or closing when tapped, and roast them the day you buy them. Discard any that stay gaping.
- YieldSix to eight oysters per person as a first course; a dozen if they are the whole plate.
Roasting oysters in the shell is generally thought to be older than any cookbook that records it: shell middens along the Atlantic coast document that oysters were eaten in quantity, and charred shell has often been taken to suggest they were roasted, with the nineteenth-century American version simply moving the fire indoors. By the 1890s oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten in enormous quantity in American cities, sold from street barrows and cellar saloons as well as restaurants, which is why a book like this can dispose of them in three sentences and expect to be understood. Roast oysters were served on buttered toast or between slices of bread, a form that survives in the oyster loaf and in the fried oyster po'boy of the Gulf Coast. The instruction to serve with "lemon or pepper sauce" is the same pairing that still governs the raw bar, and the recipe's confidence that the reader can open an oyster tells you plainly how routine the work once was in a home kitchen.