Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oyster, Prairie
Oyster, Prairie
Put a tea-spoonful of vinegar into a wine-glass, carefully slip in the yolk of an egg, add a pinch of salt and a dust of pepper, and it is ready to be swallowed.
OYSTERS (a la Maitre d'Hotel), a Chafing Dish recipe. Wash and drain two dozen oysters. Put them in a chafing-dish with a table-spoonful of butter; stir carefully, and when the edges of the oysters begin to curl add the juice of half a lemon, a table-spoonful of finely-chopped parsley, and salt and pepper. Serve at once on slices of hot buttered toast.
Two unrelated items have run together on this page: the prairie oyster, a raw-egg pick-me-up, and a chafing-dish preparation of real oysters. The first cannot be recommended; the notes below explain why, and then deal with the second.
- The raw yolk is the problemA prairie oyster is an unpasteurised egg yolk swallowed whole with nothing done to it. Salmonella can be present in the yolk itself, not merely on the shell, and nothing in the vinegar or salt here brings the egg anywhere near a temperature or acidity that would reduce that risk. Anyone wanting the effect should look to a current recipe using pasteurised eggs.
- Who is most at riskThe hazard is not evenly spread. Pregnancy, early childhood, advanced age and any suppressed immune system move this from an unwise gamble to a serious one.
- Why it is called an oysterNothing in the glass is shellfish. The name is usually explained by the look and the swallow of an intact yolk, though that account is traditional rather than documented; the entry falls beside the oyster recipes because it is alphabetised under 'Oyster'.
- The chafing-dish oysters: the hingeCurling edges is the whole timing instruction, and it is a good one. Oysters are done in roughly two minutes over moderate heat; past that the muscle tightens and turns rubbery, and they weep liquor into the pan.
- "Wash and drain"This assumes oysters shucked at home or bought in their liquor. Drain them well, because water left clinging will dilute the butter and lemon into a thin sauce rather than a glaze. Reserve the liquor if you want to reduce it separately.
- Two dozen oystersThat serves four as a savoury or first course, two as a supper dish. Use a wide pan rather than a crowded one so the oysters heat rather than steam.
- Maitre d'hotelThe name signals the classic trio of butter, lemon and chopped parsley. Add the lemon off the heat or at the very end; long contact with acid firms the oysters further.
- Without a chafing dishAny wide, shallow pan over low to moderate heat does the same work. The chafing dish existed so the cooking could happen at the table, which is also why the toast is called for hot and buttered in advance.
The prairie oyster belongs to the late nineteenth-century vocabulary of the morning after, alongside seltzer, bitters and beef tea, and its name is generally traced to the resemblance between a whole raw yolk and a shucked oyster rather than to any prairie in particular. It sits, by alphabetical accident, immediately before genuine oyster cookery, which is itself a reminder of how cheap and common oysters were in Britain and America at the time: two dozen for a chafing-dish supper was an unremarkable quantity, not a luxury. The chafing dish had its own vogue in the 1890s and 1900s as equipment for informal late-night entertaining, when a hostess cooked in front of guests with a spirit lamp and a single pan, and oysters in butter with lemon and parsley are close to the ideal dish for it: nothing to chop but the parsley, and barely two minutes over the flame.