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White Oyster Sauce
One pint of oysters, three tablespoonfuls of butter, one heaping tablespoonful of flour, one of lemon juice, salt, pepper, a speck of cayenne. Wash the oysters in enough water with the addition of the oyster liquor, to make a pint. Work the butter and flour to a smooth paste. Let the water and oyster juice come to a boil. Skim and pour on the flour and butter. Let come to a boil, and add the oysters and seasoning. Boil up once and serve. Half a cupful of the water may be omitted and half a cupful of boiling cream added at the last moment.
A simple velvet-textured oyster sauce, meant to be spooned over boiled or roast game birds, fish, or toast. The only real difficulty is knowing when to stop cooking.
- Stop at the plump stage"Boil up once and serve" is the hinge of the recipe. The oysters need only 1-2 minutes in the hot liquid, until the edges ruffle and they firm slightly; past that they tighten into rubber and leach water into the sauce.
- Washing the oystersThe instruction is compressed. Rinse the shucked oysters, then combine their strained liquor with enough water to total one pint — that pint is the liquid base of the sauce, not rinse water to be thrown away. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve or cloth to catch shell grit.
- QuantitiesOne pint of shucked oysters is roughly 24 small to 16 large ones, about 1 lb drained. Three tablespoons butter to one heaping tablespoon flour is a butter-heavy roux; if you want a thicker sauce, use a level 2 tablespoons of flour.
- Butter and flour pasteThis is a beurre manie: raw butter and flour worked smooth rather than a cooked roux. Note that the recipe pours the boiling liquid onto the paste rather than the reverse; whisk hard as you do so or it will lump, and let it boil to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Seasoning orderThe recipe adds the seasoning, lemon juice included, with the oysters before the last boil. If you are making the cream version you may prefer to hold the lemon juice back until the pan is off the heat, since acid can curdle cream.
- The cream versionReplace half a cup of the water with half a cup of cream, heated separately and stirred in last. Do not let it return to a hard boil after the cream goes in.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of liquid plus a pint of oysters will make somewhere between a pint and a half and a quart of sauce, enough for four to six servings.
White sauces built on oysters were a fixture of nineteenth-century American and English tables. Oysters were cheap and abundant in this period and were shipped inland in barrels and cans, so they served as a savoury seasoning as much as a luxury. What keeps this sauce "white," as against the browner oyster sauces of the era, is that the butter and flour go in uncooked, so the sauce stays pale enough to pour over boiled fowl or poached fish. The recipe offers the cream finish as an option without saying which version was the more usual.