Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea. Marion Harland
fry brown (when you have floured them) in butter. Take up; drain off the grease; put with the gravy, which should be ready heated, into a tin vessel with a close cover and set in a pot of hot water. It must not boil until you have put in the rest of the ingredients. Slice the onion and mushrooms, and fry in the same butter; add with the herbs and other seasoning to the meat in the pail, or inner saucepan. Cover and set to stew gently. To the butter left in the frying-pan, add three spoonfuls of browned flour (large ones) and stir to a smooth unctuous paste, without setting it on the range. Add the lemon-juice to this, and set aside until the turtle has simmered half an hour in the broth. Take up the meat, and arrange upon a covered hot-water dish; transfer the gravy to a saucepan, and boil hard five minutes uncovered. Put in the brown flour paste; stir up until it thickens well; add the wine and yolks of eggs, each cut in three pieces, and pour over the turtle.
Panned Oysters.
1 quart of oysters.
Rounds of thin toast, delicately browned.
Butter, salt and pepper.
Have ready several small pans of block tin, with upright sides. The ordinary “patty-pan” will do, if you can get nothing better, but it is well, if you are fond of oysters cooked in this way, to have the neat little tins made, at a moderate price, at a tinsmith’s. Cut stale bread in thin slices, then round—removing all the crust—of a size that will just fit in the bottoms of your pans. Toast these quickly to a light-brown, butter and lay within your tins. Wet with a great spoonful of oyster liquid, then, with a silver fork, arrange upon the toast as many oysters as the pans will hold without heaping them up. Dust with pepper and salt, put a bit of butter on top and set the pans, when all are full, upon the floor of a quick oven. Cover with an inverted baking-pan to keep in steam and flavor, and cook until the oysters “ruffle.” Eight minutes in a brisk oven, should be enough. Send very hot to the table in the tins in which they were roasted.
Next to roasting in the shell, this mode of cooking oysters best preserves the native flavor of the bivalves.
Fricasseed Oysters.
1 pint good broth—veal or chicken—well strained.
1 slice of ham—corned is better than smoked.
3 pints oysters.
1 small onion.
2 table-spoonfuls of butter.
½ cup of milk.
1 table-spoonful of corn-starch.
1 egg beaten light.
A little chopped parsley and sweet marjoram.
Pepper to taste and juice of a lemon.
If the ham be raw, soak in boiling water for half an hour before cutting it into very small slices, and putting it into the saucepan with the broth, the oyster liquor, the onion minced very fine, the herbs and pepper. Let these simmer for fifteen minutes, and boil fast for five, then skim and put in the oysters. Boil up once briskly, keeping the contents of the saucepan well stirred. Have ready the corn-starch, rubbed smoothly into the milk. Stir this in and heat carefully, using the spoon constantly until it boils and begins to thicken, when the butter should go in. So soon as this is melted take out the oysters with a skimmer; put into a hot covered dish, heat the broth again to a boil, remove the saucepan from the fire, and stir in cautiously the beaten egg. A better way is to cook the latter gradually by beating in with it a few tablespoonfuls of the scalding liquor, before putting the egg into the saucepan.
Turn the gravy over the oysters, and serve at once. Squeeze in the lemon-juice after the tureen is on the table, as it is apt to curdle the mixture if left to stand.
Send around cream crackers, and green pickles or olives with this savory dish.
Oysters Boiled in the Shell.
Large shell-oysters, washed very clean and scraped, but not opened.
Pot of boiling water over a hot fire.
Sauce of melted butter with chopped or powdered parsley.
A lemon, cut in half.
Put the oysters, one by one, quickly and carefully into the water, which must be kept at a hard boil all the time. In five minutes, turn off every drop of the water by inverting the pot over a cullender, dry the shells rapidly with a soft cloth and send to table upon a hot dish. Squeeze a few drops of lemon-juice upon each oyster, and put a little hot melted butter with pepper over it before eating it from the shell.
The epicurean oyster-lover may consider boiled oysters insipid, but they are liked by many.
Scalloped Oysters (No. 1).
Large, fine shell-oysters.
Butter.
Fine bread-crumbs, or rolled cracker.
Minced parsley, pepper and salt.
Lemon-juice.
Open the shells, setting aside for use the deepest ones. Have ready some melted butter, not hot, seasoned with minced parsley and pepper. Roll each oyster in this, letting it drip as little as may be, and lay in the shells, which should be arranged in a baking-pan. Add to each a little lemon-juice, sift bread-crumbs over it, and bake in a quick oven until done.
Serve in the shells.
Scalloped Oysters (No. 2).
1 quart of oysters.
1 teacupful very dry bread-crumbs, or pounded cracker.
2 great spoonfuls butter.
½ cup of milk, or cream, if you can get it.
Pepper to taste.
A little salt.
Cover the bottom of a baking-dish (well buttered) with a layer of crumbs, and wet these with the cream, put on spoonful by spoonful. Pepper and salt, and strew with minute bits of butter. Next, put in the oysters, with a little of their liquor. Pepper them, stick bits of butter in among them, and cover with dry crumbs until the oysters are entirely hidden. More pieces of butter, very small, and arranged thickly on top. Set in the oven, invert a plate over it to keep in the flavor, and bake until the juice bubbles up to the top. Remove the cover, and brown on the upper grating for two or three minutes—certainly not longer.
Send to table in the bake-dish.
This is a good intermediate course between fish and meat, and is always popular.
Broiled Oysters.