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Oyster Cocktails
1 tablespoon fresh grated horse- 1 tablespoon Worcestershire radish. 1 tablespoon vinegar. 2 tablespoons lemon juice.
Sauce. 3 tablespoons tomato catsup. 1 teaspoon salt.
Few drops Tobasco Sauce.
PROCESS: Mix ingredients in the order given. Chill thoroughly and pour over oyster cocktails. Place six small oysters in each cocktail glass, add sauce and serve very cold. This sauce is sufficient for six cocktails. Oyster Cocktails may be served very attractively in tomato cups.
This is a cocktail sauce with serving instructions attached, and it converts to a modern kitchen almost unchanged. The variables are the catsup, the horseradish and the oysters themselves.
- The garbled ingredient listThe original is set in two columns and reads scrambled: it is 1 tablespoon fresh grated horseradish, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 3 tablespoons tomato catsup, 1 teaspoon salt, and a few drops of Tabasco. That comes to a little over half a cup of sauce for six servings.
- Sourcing the oystersThese are eaten raw. Buy from a dealer who sells shellfish tagged for raw consumption, keep them cold and shuck them within hours of serving. Raw oysters carry a Vibrio risk that is serious for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised or with liver disease, and no amount of hot sauce changes that.
- Catsup then and nowCommercial tomato catsup of the period was generally thinner, sharper and less sweet than modern ketchup. Three tablespoons of today's product may push the sauce sweet; cut it back or add a little more vinegar and lemon to compensate.
- Horseradish"Fresh grated" means the root, and it matters here because the volatile heat of grated horseradish fades within an hour or two. Prepared horseradish from a jar works but is already acidulated, so hold back some of the vinegar.
- The saltA full teaspoon in half a cup of sauce is a lot, especially over oysters that carry their own brine. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- Chilling"Chill thoroughly" and "serve very cold" are the whole point. Make the sauce ahead, refrigerate it, and set the cocktail glasses on ice or in the freezer beforehand. Warm oysters in warm sauce are unpleasant.
- Sauce over oysters, not oysters in sauceSpoon the chilled sauce over the oysters at the moment of serving. Left to sit, the acid begins to firm and cloud the oysters.
- Tomato cupsA hollowed-out small tomato, salted and drained upside down for fifteen minutes, set on a bed of shaved ice or shredded lettuce. Six small oysters will not fit in most modern tomatoes; three or four is realistic.
- YieldSix cocktails, three dozen small oysters in all. Figure roughly a pint to a pint and a half of shucked small oysters, or three to four dozen in the shell.
The oyster cocktail belongs to the brief, specific moment when American oysters were cheap enough to be everyday food and stemmed glassware was cheap enough to be everyday tableware. Beds along both coasts were being worked hard through the late nineteenth century, and by the 1900s oysters appeared at every level of the table, from the saloon free lunch to the formal dinner's first course. Serving them raw in a footed glass with a spiced tomato sauce, rather than on the half shell, was the fashionable form; the sauce's genealogy runs through Worcestershire and the bottled tomato catsups that had become reliable industrial products by then, and Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the 1860s, was one of the few hot sauces a Northern housewife could buy by name. Oysters were traditionally eaten in the months with an R in them, a rule that predates refrigeration and is usually explained by both spawning season and the risk of warm-weather spoilage.