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Waldorf Oysters
One quart of selected oysters, three tablespoons of grated cheese, Put three tablespoons of horseradish, three tablespoons of butter. ingredients together, add a good deal of salt, paprika and red pepper. Cook in individual ramekins. First, put in a few bread crumbs, then layers of oysters and the mixture (in dabs), finishing off with bread crumbs, and bake in a hot oven long enough to bake through, and serve very hot. Enough for six people.
The text has been garbled in typesetting, with a word run into the ingredient line: read it as one quart of selected oysters, three tablespoons each of grated cheese, horseradish and butter, worked together with salt and both peppers. The rest of the method is intact.
- Don't overbakeThis is the hinge. Shucked oysters need only a few minutes of heat before they tighten and turn rubbery; the crumb top should be brown and the oyster liquor bubbling at the edge, around 10 to 12 minutes, and no longer. "Long enough to bake through" refers to the crumbs, not to any notion of cooking the oysters hard.
- A hot oven425 to 450F. High heat is what lets the crumbs colour before the oysters overcook.
- "Selected" oystersSelects was an old size grade for shucked oysters, in the medium range; the exact count to the quart varied between packing houses. Any fresh shucked oyster of moderate size does the job; drain them and reserve a little of the liquor.
- A quart of oystersTwo 16 oz containers of shucked oysters. Drain well or the ramekins will flood and the crumbs will never crisp.
- The horseradishPeriod recipes mean freshly grated root or the plain bottled kind in vinegar. Squeeze bottled horseradish dry before measuring, and avoid creamed or beet-tinted versions, which will slacken and sweeten the mixture.
- The cheeseUnspecified; a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan or a dry aged cheddar suits the dish. Three tablespoons across a quart of oysters is a seasoning, not a topping, so keep it fine.
- "A good deal of salt"Judge this against the oysters, which are already saline, and against the cheese. Start with half a teaspoon for the whole mixture and taste the butter paste before assembling.
- Ramekins and assemblySix 4 to 6 oz dishes, set on a sheet pan. Crumbs, oysters, dabs of the seasoned butter, crumbs; dot the top with a little extra butter so it browns rather than dries.
- YieldSix, as stated. Serve immediately as it stands.
Attaching "Waldorf" to a dish was a common bit of borrowed prestige in American community cookbooks around 1900, when the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria in New York set the standard for hotel cooking and its maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, was widely known; the Waldorf salad is the preparation most securely traced to that kitchen, while other "Waldorf" recipes in local collections often have no connection to the hotel. The dish itself belongs to a large family of baked-oyster receipts — scalloped oysters, oysters Rockefeller, oysters in ramekins — that flourished when cheap, plentiful Eastern oysters were shipped inland by rail in barrels and tins. The horseradish-and-red-pepper seasoning is characteristic of the period's taste for sharp, warming garnishes with shellfish, and the individual ramekin marks it as company food rather than family supper.