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Oysters in Forcemeat
(A French recipe.) Cook 18 oysters with 1 ounce of butter, 1/2 cup of juice, pepper, and salt, for 10 minutes. Have ready 6 ounces of forcemeat made of equal parts of chopped chicken and bread-crumbs, an egg, herbs, a spoonful of butter and seasoning, mixed with enough milk or stock to make a paste. Dip each oyster in this, covering thickly, then in bread-crumbs and egg, and fry brown. Serve with a white sauce and border of parsley.
SCALLOPS (as cooked in Brest, France.).
Fry 1 pint of scallops in 1 ounce of butter, add 2 minced onions, a tablespoonful of flour, and 1/2 pint of the juice, also the yolks of 4 eggs and 1/2 cup of bread-crumbs. Bake in small shells.
Two French coast recipes run together on one page. Both are workable, but the oyster timing and the raw-chicken coating need attention before you start.
- Cut the poaching timeTen minutes in butter and liquor will shrink the oysters to erasers. Two minutes, just until the edges ruffle, is enough; they get further cooking in the fryer.
- "Juice" means oyster liquorHalf a cup of the liquid drained from the shucked oysters, strained through a fine sieve to catch grit. If your oysters are lean, top up with fish stock or bottled clam juice rather than water. The scallop recipe's "1/2 pint of the juice" is ambiguous; scallops yield far less liquor than that, so expect to make it up with fish stock.
- The forcemeat contains raw chickenThe forcemeat may contain raw chicken -- The recipe does not say whether the chopped chicken is raw or cooked, and both were used in period forcemeats. If raw, six ounces of paste spread thickly will not cook through in the time it takes the crumbs to brown. Either use cooked chicken, keep the coating thin, or poach the coated oysters briefly before crumbing and frying, and take the coating to 165F on an instant-read thermometer.
- Frying temperatureShallow-fry in butter and oil at about 350F. Butter alone at frying heat will darken before the interior is done.
- Ounces are weight, cups are volumeOne ounce of butter is two tablespoons. Six ounces of forcemeat is roughly three-quarters of a cup of packed paste, which works out at about two teaspoons per oyster.
- "Small shells" for the scallopsScallop shells, ramekins or gratin dishes of about half a cup. Bake in a moderate oven, 350F, for 15 to 20 minutes, until set and lightly coloured. The yolks are there to thicken, so avoid a hotter oven, which curdles them.
- Temper the yolksBeat the four yolks with a little of the hot thickened juice before returning them to the pan, off the heat. Added straight to a boiling sauce they scramble.
- The white sauceA plain béchamel or a velouté built on the strained oyster liquor. The recipe names it without giving a method.
- YieldEighteen oysters serves three as a first course. The scallops, a pint shucked, fill four to six small shells.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre in which an American traveller collected dishes abroad and brought them home with their provenance attached "a French recipe," "as cooked in Brest" being part of the appeal. Brest is a Breton naval port, and coquilles Saint-Jacques of roughly this shape onions, a flour-thickened sauce of the cooking liquor, crumbs, baked in the shell has long been associated with the Breton and Norman coasts; the name is generally traced to the scallop shell worn by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. The oyster dish suggests how cheap oysters may still have been on both sides of the Atlantic before the beds were depleted in the early twentieth century: eighteen of them go into what is essentially a fritter, alongside chicken forcemeat.