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Raw Oysters
Wash the shells, open, detaching the flat shell, loosen from the deep shell, but leave them in it, and serve half dozen on a plate, with a quarter of lemon in center. Eat with salt, pepper and lemon juice or vinegar.
In serving them without the shells the most attractive way is in a dish of ice, made by freezing water in a tin form shaped like a salad bowl, or in a block of ice from which a cavity has been melted with a hot flat-iron. They should first be drained well in a colander, sprinkled with plenty of pepper and salt, and placed on the ice and let remain in a cool place for half an hour or until time of serving.
A simpler and equally delicious way is to drain well, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and place the dish on ice or in a dish of cold water for half an hour before serving, adding bits of ice. Serve with horse-radish, Chili sauce, slices of lemon, or simply vinegar.
Less a recipe than a serving protocol from the era when oysters were cheap and everywhere. Most of it still holds; two habits do not.
- The hinge: buy live, shuck to orderShells should be tightly closed, or close when tapped; discard any that gape or smell of anything but seawater. Oysters shucked and left standing lose their liquor and their texture, so open them as close to serving as you can manage.
- Skip the half-hour restThe instruction to season, then hold on ice or in cold water for thirty minutes, belongs to a period before mechanical refrigeration, when a chill at table had to be engineered from block ice. Salt will draw liquor out of the meat over that time, and standing water dilutes the flavor. Seasoning at the table is the safer bet.
- "Detaching the flat shell"The top (flat) shell is cut free by running the knife along its inside to sever the adductor muscle; the oyster is then loosened from the deep shell but left sitting in its own liquor. Use a proper oyster knife and a folded towel or glove, not a paring knife.
- The ice bowl and the flat-ironA block of ice hollowed out with a heated flat-iron was a Victorian party trick. A rimmed platter of crushed ice, packed and depressed with the back of a spoon to seat each shell, does the same job and will not tip.
- Who should not eat themRaw oysters carry a real risk of Vibrio and norovirus. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease or high iron levels should eat oysters cooked. Buy from a source that can tell you the harvest area and date.
- QuantityHalf a dozen per plate as written is a first course; count six to nine per person if oysters are the whole point of the course. Oysters in the shell were commonly sold by the bushel, a measure that could hold anywhere from about a hundred large oysters to two or three hundred small ones.
- AccompanimentsThe "Chili sauce" of this book is a cooked tomato relish with vinegar and spice, not a hot pepper sauce. Grated fresh horseradish and plain vinegar are both named in the recipe; vinegar with shallot and cracked pepper, close to what we now call a mignonette, is a better match for these oysters than a heavy commercial cocktail sauce.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s, and the length of its shell-fish chapter is a good measure of how thoroughly the railroad had rearranged American eating. Chesapeake and Long Island Sound beds were being dredged on an industrial scale, and barrels of oysters in the shell and cans of shucked ones moved inland fast enough that a landlocked Midwestern household could treat raw oysters as an ordinary opening course rather than a coastal luxury. Oyster cellars and saloons were fixtures of nineteenth-century American cities, and the fashion for serving the raw oyster bedded in carved or molded ice belongs to the same moment as the commercial ice trade, when a block of ice was a household staple and something to show off with. Overharvesting and pollution had thinned the great beds badly by the early twentieth century, which is one reason oysters read as expensive to us and cheap to the book's original readers.</history>