Oyster Salad
One quart oysters scalded in their liquor enough to plump them, pour in a colander to drain, when entirely cold, cut them in small pieces and mix with a cup of cold chicken or turkey and a cup of celery, all cut as for chicken salad. Make your dressing of three hard boiled eggs, one tablespoon butter, two tablespoons mustard, four tablespoons vinegar, pepper and salt to taste. Pour over oysters and chicken just before using.
A cold composed salad of the kind that anchored a late-Victorian supper table, built on a cooked egg dressing rather than mayonnaise. Most of the work is in restraint: the oysters are barely cooked, and the dressing goes on at the last moment.
- Plump, do not simmerThe hinge of the dish. Bring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle and they firm slightly, roughly two minutes over moderate heat. Anything past that and they tighten into rubber, which no dressing will disguise.
- A quart of oystersThat is a quart of shucked oysters with their liquor, about 4 cups. The drained weight will be appreciably less than that, and the count varies widely with size: somewhere in the region of two to three dozen medium oysters.
- The mustard is ambiguousTwo tablespoons is a great deal of prepared mustard and a very great deal of dry English mustard powder. The text says only 'mustard', and dry powder is a plausible reading, but either way the quantity is aggressive by modern taste; mix the dressing, taste, and hold some back.
- How the dressing goes togetherThe text says only 'three hard boiled eggs', so the handling is left to the cook: mash the yolks smooth with the softened butter and mustard until pasty, then work in the vinegar a spoonful at a time so it does not break. The chopped whites can be folded in or scattered over.
- Cut as for chicken saladThat means a rough dice of about half an inch, not a mince. The celery should be the tender inner ribs, strung and cut the same size, so the three elements read separately on the fork.
- Cold, and cold all the way throughThe oysters must be entirely cold before cutting, as the text insists, and the salad should stay refrigerated. Shellfish held at room temperature in an acid dressing is the classic way to spoil a supper dish.
- Dress at the tableThe instruction to pour over just before using is not decoration. Vinegar draws water from the oysters and celery within the hour, and the salad slackens into a puddle.
- YieldServes six to eight as a supper dish, more if it is one of several things on the table. Serve it on crisp lettuce leaves with thin buttered bread.
Oysters were cheap protein in nineteenth-century America, hauled inland by rail and barrel in such quantity that cookbooks of the period treat them as casually as we treat canned tuna, and supper chapters like this one are thick with oyster stews, patties, fritters and salads. The dressing here belongs to the era before commercial mayonnaise: hard-boiled yolks mashed with butter, mustard and vinegar made a sauce that did not depend on the cook's arm or on raw eggs, and variations on it appear under names like boiled dressing in the period. Stretching oysters with leftover chicken or turkey also suggests where the recipe sits in the household calendar, presumably somewhere in the days after a roast, when the supper table was expected to be handsome without any fresh cooking of meat.