Oysters au Gratin

As exquisite as raw oysters are, the prized mollusks were also very popular cooked in the Edwardian era, and a large number of such recipes appear in cookbooks of the time (quite a lot involving Champagne). They were traditionally included in the savory course at the end of the meal, but they were also sometimes offered as hors d’oeuvres. Oysters had once been so plentiful that they were eaten by everyone, and although they were becoming scarcer, and therefore more expensive, by the twentie