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Oysters on Ice
Take a large square of ice; hollow it out in the middle sufficiently to form a bowl large enough to contain the number of oysters required. Put the oysters on the ice, place on a flat dish and serve.
This is a serving method rather than a cooked dish: a block of ice hollowed into a bowl, filled with oysters, set on a platter. Everything depends on the ice and on the oysters themselves.
- The oysters are meant to be shuckedThe oysters are probably meant to be shucked -- A dish served this way would most likely have meant oysters on the half shell, opened shortly before they went to the table; shucking them long in advance leaves them dry and slack.
- Hollowing the blockOne way to do this is with a heated metal implement — a hot flatiron, saucepan bottom or poker — worked into the ice to melt a basin, rather than a chisel, which risks splitting the block. A large plastic bowl of water frozen with a smaller weighted bowl set inside it gives the same shape with no carving at all.
- Meltwater is the problemA solid hollowed block drains nowhere. Set the block in a rimmed dish deep enough to catch an hour's melt, or chip a channel out to one edge, or the shells float and the liquor washes away.
- Cold, not freezingOysters should sit on the ice cup side down and be served within about half an hour. Very cold ice straight from a freezer may chill the meat hard enough to affect its texture.
- SourcingBuy from a counter that can show the harvest tag, keep the oysters at refrigerator temperature under a damp cloth (never sealed in water or plastic), and discard any that gape and will not close. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised or with liver disease should not eat raw oysters at all.
- QuantityThe original leaves the number to the cook. Six oysters per person as a first course, a dozen if they are the whole point of the course; size the hollow to the number you intend to serve.
- Accompaniments the book assumesAccompaniments -- Lemon quarters, brown bread and butter, and a peppery vinegar or a horseradish sauce were the usual accompaniments for raw oysters and are not mentioned here.
Serving raw oysters in a carved block of ice was a piece of dining-room theatre made possible by the nineteenth-century ice trade, which put cheap sawdust-packed lake and river ice into hotels, oyster saloons and, in America especially, ordinary town households. Oysters were then a common food rather than a luxury one — vast beds in Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound and the Thames estuary supplied them by the barrel, and cookbooks of the period devote whole chapters to them, fried, scalloped, stewed and in patties. The ice bowl belongs to the same taste for cold display that produced moulded jellies and elaborate table centrepieces: no cooking, no seasoning, just the raw material set out to look like an ornament. Overfishing and pollution thinned the great beds within a generation, which is why oysters read as expensive to us and did not to readers at the time.