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French Panned Oysters
Drain fifty oysters, add 2 ounces of butter, mixed in a pan or casserole with 2 teaspoonfuls of flour and 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Stir, blend, and season. When the oysters begin to curl, add the yolks of 2 eggs and, still stirring, pour over slices of toast.
A one-pan oyster dish that lives or dies on two things: how briefly the oysters cook and how gently the yolks go in. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: barely cook themOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, which takes roughly a minute or two in hot butter. Anything past that and they tighten into rubber and weep liquid into the sauce.
- Egg yolks off the heatStir the yolks in with the pan pulled from the burner, ideally slackened first with a spoonful of the hot liquid. Held over direct heat they will scramble rather than thicken.
- "Casserole"Here the word is being used in its French sense, a saucepan or sauté pan on the stovetop, which is what the stirring implies; period books also used "casserole" for a baking dish, but that is not the sense needed.
- QuantityFifty shucked oysters is roughly two quarts, serving six to eight on toast. A modern pint of shucked oysters holds about 12 to 16 medium ones, so scale to what you buy.
- Drain, but keep the liquorThe recipe adds no liquid beyond the butter, relying on whatever the oysters shed in the pan, and two teaspoons of flour with 2 oz butter is closer to a beurre manié than a sauce. Reserved oyster liquor, added by the spoonful, will help turn it into something pourable.
- "Season"Salt and white or black pepper at minimum; some cooks of the period also used cayenne or nutmeg with oysters, though this recipe specifies nothing. Oysters carry their own salt, so season at the end.
- Buying and holdingUse oysters shucked the same day and kept cold. Refrigerated shucked oysters in liquor are the practical substitute; discard any with a sour or ammoniac smell.
- The toastCut thick, toast dry and hard, and plate it hot. Soft or cool toast dissolves under an egg-thickened sauce almost immediately.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century American genre: collections that gathered "foreign" household recipes for cooks who were unlikely ever to travel, with each dish tagged by nationality as much as by technique. What makes this one French is not the oysters, which were cheap and everywhere on the American coast at the time, but the finish — a liaison of egg yolks stirred in off the fire, the same thickening used in a blanquette or a poulette sauce. Panned oysters in the plainer American manner are generally said to have been little more than butter, pepper and toast; the yolks are the borrowed refinement. The scale of the recipe is a period detail in itself. Fifty oysters seems to have been an unremarkable domestic purchase around the turn of the century, before a century of harvesting and habitat loss made the beds of the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound a fraction of what they had been.