BOOK/A TABLE - Oysters Rockefeller

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I was in 5th grade when I first read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder and I remember feeling like I'd woken up in a whole new world. My mother and her friends all read Christie’s exciting books and Sleeping Murder had just come out in paperback. Entering a copy seemed a portal, or at least a glimpse, into adulthood. I was so intrigued—and also a little terrified—by the story of a young woman brought to live in a new home that seems more than a little familiar to her. I have never looked at Playtex rubber gloves the same way again.

In Christie’s books, so often the air is rich with cyanide, pistol smoke, and the perverse, ringing shock of discovering a dead body at a reserved English country house. Among the self-satisfied men in pressed flannel and women dressed in sphinxlike smiles, at least one of them has murder lurking in their desperate hearts when committing le crime passionnel—the crime of passion.

So what else to serve on Valentine’s Day but the impassioned oyster, long considered to be an aphrodisiac? Do these Oysters Rockefeller right and your beloved might be so enamored, they might let you...get away with murder! At least enjoy them as Hercule Poirot perhaps did in Christie’s fiendishly clever Murder on the Orient Express. In Karen Pierce's fabulous book, Recipes for Murder, she reveals Poirot does confess on the famous train that “the food was unusually good...”

 

 

Check out Karen Pierce’s Recipesfor Murder—66 Dishes that Celebrate the Mysteries of Agatha Christie for an Oysters Rockefeller recipe...or shucks, consider the one I’ve included below.

Oysters Rockefeller 

Adapted from Gourmet

“The original recipe for oysters Rockefeller, created at the New Orleans restaurant Antoine's in 1899, remains a secret to this day.” 

Makes 8 first-course servings

1 garlic clove

2 cups loosely packed fresh spinach

1 bunch watercress, stems trimmed

1/2 cup chopped green onions

3/4 cup (11/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs

2 tablespoons Pernod or other anise-flavored liqueur

1 teaspoon fennel seeds, ground

1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce

1 pound (about) rock salt

24 fresh oysters, shucked, shells reserved

1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Step 1. Position rack in top third of oven and preheat to 450°F. Finely chop garlic in processor. Add spinach, watercress and green onions to garlic. Process, using on/off turns, until mixture is finely chopped. Transfer mixture to medium bowl.

Step 2. Combine butter, breadcrumbs, Pernod, fennel and hot sauce in processor. Process until well blended. Return spinach mixture to processor. Process, using on/off turns, just until mixtures are blended. Season with salt and pepper. (Can be made 8 hours ahead. Cover; chill.)

Step 3. Sprinkle rock salt over large baking sheet to depth of 1/2 inch. Arrange oysters in half shells atop rock salt. Top each oyster with 1 tablespoon spinach mixture. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake until spinach mixture browns on top, about 8 minutes.

Do enjoy!