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Oyster Cocktail
To each service, allow two teaspoons of chili sauce or catsup, one-half teaspoon of lemon juice, one-half teaspoon of grated horseradish, one-quarter teaspoon of onion juice and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Mix thoroughly, and serve in small glasses placed in the center of the plates, surrounded by oysters on cracked ice.
— Mrs. Willard E. Myers
A per-person sauce rather than a batch recipe, which makes it easy to scale but gives no guidance on the oysters themselves. A few notes on quantities, substitutions and sourcing.
- Yield and oyster countYield -- The measurements given make one serving of sauce, roughly a tablespoon. The recipe gives no oyster count; a half-dozen is a common first-course allowance, and doubling the sauce is reasonable if your guests dip generously.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavor without texture: grate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a fine sieve. A quarter teaspoon is genuinely all you want, as it dominates quickly.
- Chili sauce is not hot sauceIn 1900s American cookery chili sauce meant a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish close to ketchup with more spice and onion, not a capsicum condiment. Bottled chili sauce of that older style is still sold; ketchup, as the recipe allows, is the plain substitute.
- HorseradishGrated fresh root was assumed. Prepared horseradish in vinegar works, but drain it first or the sauce turns thin and sharp.
- The cracked ice mattersThe oysters sit on ice, not in it, and the sauce glass is bedded in the middle of the plate. Keep the shucked oysters over ice until the moment of serving and drain them well, since retained liquor dilutes the sauce on the first dip.
- Sourcing the oystersThey are eaten raw, so buy from a supplier who can name the harvest waters and date, keep them below 40F, and discard any that do not close or that smell of anything but sea. Raw shellfish is not advisable for pregnant people, young children, or anyone immunocompromised or with liver disease.
- Make it just before servingThe lemon and onion juice taste freshest soon after mixing, so make the sauce shortly before the plates go out.
The oyster cocktail belongs to the era when "cocktail," a word whose food sense was a later extension of the drink sense, began to attach itself to a first course: American menus from the 1890s onward list oyster and clam cocktails served in small stemmed glasses at the head of a formal dinner, an idea that later hardened into the shrimp cocktail of the mid-twentieth century. The sauce is essentially the same family as what came to be called cocktail sauce, built on tomato, lemon, horseradish and Worcestershire, though this version uses onion juice rather than the grated onion or celery salt some contemporaries preferred. It is a reminder of how cheap and widespread oysters were in New York generally before the beds were fished out and polluted in the early twentieth century. The book credits each contributor by married name, so the receipt travels under Mrs. Willard E. Myers rather than her own.