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Boston Oyster Pie

A historical recipe from The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the, by Gillette, F. L. (Fanny Lemira), Hugo Ziemann (1887).

A historical recipe

The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, Etc., Etc. The Whole Comprising a Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Gillette, F. L. (Fanny Lemira), Hugo Ziemann (1887). Project Gutenberg eBook #13923.

From an old book: a historical recipe, not current advice. Its methods, additives and storage may be unsafe by today's standards.

Source and licence

From The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the, by Gillette, F. L. (Fanny Lemira), Hugo Ziemann (1887). Digitised by Project Gutenberg, eBook #13923 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13923). Public domain in the USA; its status may differ elsewhere.

Read the original Public domain in the USA

What was changed: As printed, from the book's text; Project Gutenberg's header and licence removed. Ingredient lines were read out of the text by a program. A historical recipe, not current advice.

United States. Associated with United States by a place in its title: boston (confidence 0.65). "Associated with" means only that the evidence named here links this recipe to that place. A recipe isn't labelled as representing an entire country because a source associates it with one, and regional origins are kept where the source gives them.

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Ingredients

Method

  1. Having buttered the inside of a deep pie plate, line it with puff paste, or common pie crust, and prepare another sheet of paste for the lid;
  2. put a clean towel into the dish (folded so as to support the lid), set it into the oven and bake the paste well;
  3. when done, remove the lid and take out the towel.
  4. While the paste is baking, prepare the oysters.
  5. Having picked off carefully every bit of shell that may be found about them, drain the liquor into a pan and put the oysters into a stewpan with barely enough of the liquor to keep them from burning;
  6. season them with pepper, salt and butter;
  7. add a little sweet cream or milk, and one or two crackers rolled fine;
  8. let the oysters simmer, but not boil, as that will shrivel them.
  9. Remove the upper crust of pastry and fill the dish with the oysters and gravy.
  10. Replace the cover and serve hot.
  11. Some prefer baking the upper crust on a pie plate, the same size as the pie, then slipping it off on top of the pie after the same pie is filled with the oysters.
  12. Grate the corn, while green and tender, with a coarse grater, into a deep dish.
  13. For two ears of corn, allow one egg;
  14. beat the whites and yolks separately, and add them to the corn, with one tablespoonful of wheat flour and one of butter, a teaspoonful of salt and pepper to taste.
  15. Drop spoonfuls of this batter into a frying pan with hot butter and lard mixed, and fry a light brown on both sides.
  16. In taste, they have a singular resemblance to fried oysters.
  17. The corn must be young.