Oysters Rockefeller

One of my favorite (and most requested) recipes:

Oysters Rockefeller

(Serves 8)

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/3 cup Panko bread crumbs
2 shallots, chopped
2 cups chopped fresh spinach
1/4 cup Pernod (Anise flavored liqueur)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Dash red pepper sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 dozen oysters, on the half shell
Rock salt
Lemon wedges, for garnish

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Melt butter in a sauté pan over medium high heat.

Sauté the garlic for 2 minutes to infuse the butter.

Place the bread crumbs in a mixing bowl and add half the garlic butter, set aside.

To the remaining garlic butter in the sauté pan, add shallots and spinach, cook for 3 minutes until the spinach wilts.

Deglaze the pan with Pernod.   

Season with salt and pepper and a dash of red pepper sauce. 

Allow the mixture to cook down for a few minutes.

Finish the bread crumbs by mixing in olive oil, Parmesan and parsley, and season with salt and pepper.

Spoon 1 heaping teaspoon of the spinach mixture on each oyster, followed by a spoonful of the bread crumb mixture.

Sprinkle a baking pan liberally with rock salt and arrange the oysters in the salt to steady them. 

Bake in the preheated oven for 10 to 12 minutes until golden.

Serve with lemon wedges and red pepper sauce.

Serves 8.

Oysters Come Back in Vogue

In Falmouth, October marks the beginning of the oyster season. For centuries, this small fishing village on the southwest coast of England has welcomed seafarers and fisherman to dredge its wild oyster beds, which lay dotted along the silt flats of the Fal estuary. Their prize is the native or flat oyster—a sweet, delicate, saucer-shaped mollusk much sought after by the Romans, whose historian Pliny the Elder recommended them for improving the complexion.

Today, it is their taste—an experience that lays somewhere between the sea bed and the salty water—that attracts thousands of visitors to the Cornish village of Falmouth. 

Next weekend, the rivers around the Fal estuary will be flooded with small oyster boats, known as Falmouth working boats, powered by sail or hand-pulled, looking to dredge the many oyster beds that lie beneath the waters. (For oystermen fishing in the Port of Truro Oyster Fishery, engines are prohibited, by decree of ancient laws put in place to protect the natural ecology of the river beds and the oysters.) Once the fishermen have collected their haul, the oysters will be purified for 36 hours before they are sold to customers across Europe, a practice that will continue until the end of the season in March.

It is part of a renaissance of the British oyster, says Nick Hodges, executive head chef at the Flying Fish restaurant at St. Michaels Hotel in Falmouth. "Oysters are back in vogue. We've gone through times when their popularity has dwindled, but now they are very much a prize possession again," says Mr. Hodges, whose grandparents farmed oysters. "Even on a local basis, they are on a lot more Cornish menus now. We now export much more to the European market, something we were not doing a few years ago."

There are two main kinds of oysters found in the British Isles: the flat, or native, oyster (Ostrea edulis), most famously grown among the beds in Whitstable, Colchester and Helford; and the rock, or Pacific, oyster (Crassostrea gigas), which was introduced commercially into Britain in the 1960s.

Although they are smaller, the native oysters are widely regarded as tasting superior, with a more delicate, metallic note. Rock oysters, meanwhile, are characterized as having a rough shell and a tear-dropped shaped. They tend to have a sweeter, more salty flavor and are meatier in texture. According to Drew Smith, author of "Oyster: A World History," oyster fossils can be found in England's Portland stone, which dates back to the Jurassic period, making them one of the oldest foodstuffs in the world.

Read the rest of the story here.