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Oysters on the Half Shell (Dozen oysters lemons cut)
3 dozen oysters. 2 lemons cut in quarters.
Salt, pepper, Tobasco, horseradish and Tomato catsup. PROCESS: If possible, have the little Blue Points. Open, loosen, and leave them on the lower shell. Fill soup plates with shaved ice and arrange shell on ice having the small end of shells point toward center of the plate. Wash lemons, cut in quarters, remove seeds and serve one-quarter in center of each plate. Garnish with sprays of parsley arranged between the shells. Pass remaining ingredients on a small silver tray, or a cocktail dressing may be made and served in a small glass dish and passed to each guest.
This is an assembly job rather than a cooked dish, so almost everything depends on the oysters themselves and on keeping them cold from the fishmonger to the table.
- The hinge: cold, and shucked lastShuck within an hour of serving and keep the shells level so the liquor stays in. Warm oysters and drained oysters are the two ways this course fails; the shaved ice in the plate is structural, not decorative.
- Blue PointsA small, mild Long Island oyster, once a market name and now loosely applied to many East Coast oysters. Any small cupped oyster of about 3 inches works; ask for something advertised as mild and briny rather than large and meaty.
- YieldThree dozen serves six as a first course, six oysters each. Buy a few extra since some shells break in shucking.
- "Open, loosen"Cut the adductor muscle from both shells so the oyster slides free, then set it back in the deep bottom shell with its liquor. A guest should not have to fight it with a fork.
- TobascoA common contemporary misspelling of Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the late 1860s and little changed since. Pass it, along with the horseradish and catsup, rather than dressing the oysters in the kitchen.
- Cocktail dressingThe recipe gives no formula. A workable modern one is tomato catsup with grated horseradish to taste, sharpened with lemon juice and a few drops of hot sauce; mixing it ahead lets the horseradish loosen.
- Sourcing and raw-shellfish riskBuy oysters live, tightly closed, from a dealer who can show tags; discard any that gape and do not close when tapped. Raw oysters carry a real risk of Vibrio and norovirus, and are not appropriate for pregnant women, young children, the elderly, or anyone with liver disease or a compromised immune system.
- Silver trayNot required. What the instruction is really getting at is that condiments travel separately so each guest dresses their own; a small dish with a spoon does the same work.
Raw oysters on the half shell open a great many American menus from the 1880s through the 1910s, and the East Coast oyster was still cheap and abundant — beds from Chesapeake Bay to Long Island Sound supplied city markets by the barrel, and oyster saloons were for much of the nineteenth century ordinary eating houses rather than luxuries. Blue Point, taken from Blue Point on the Great South Bay of Long Island, was already a name applied far beyond its origin, which is part of why shellfish regulation of the period concerned itself with naming as well as sanitation. The tomato-and-horseradish "cocktail dressing" mentioned almost in passing here was then a fairly new fashion, generally traced to the same turn-of-the-century vogue that produced the oyster cocktail served in a glass, and it is the ancestor of the bottled seafood cocktail sauce on supermarket shelves now. The rule that oysters are best in the months with an R in them was practical advice about spawning season and warm-weather spoilage before refrigeration, not superstition.