Oyster Salad
2 cups oysters 2 cups diced celery 2 eggs 1/4 cup cream 1/4 cup vinegar 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1/2 teaspoon celery salt 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon butter Drain, clean and parboil the oysters, drain again; beat the eggs, add slowly the cream and vinegar, seasonings and butter. Cook in a double boiler until like soft custard. Add the drained oysters. Cool on ice and at serving time add the celery. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves.
A cooked ("boiled") dressing rather than mayonnaise, with the oysters barely cooked and the celery kept raw for crunch. Two things decide whether it works: how briefly the oysters are heated, and how gently the custard is handled.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesParboil here is brief -- Bring the oysters just to a simmer and lift them out the moment the edges ruffle, a minute or two at most. Anything longer and they shrink and turn rubbery in the cold dressing.
- 2 cups oystersThat is roughly a pint of shucked oysters, about 20 to 24 medium ones.
- The dressing is a custardCook it over water that is steaming but not boiling and stir constantly until it coats the spoon, around 170F. Past that the eggs scramble and no amount of beating will bring the sauce back.
- CreamA richer cream will behave better here than half-and-half; the fat helps keep the vinegar from tightening the eggs too fast.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Mix it with a little of the cream first so it does not sit in lumps.
- Few grains cayenneA pinch, no more than an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there for warmth behind the vinegar rather than heat you can identify.
- Cool on iceChill the dressed oysters thoroughly in the refrigerator, ideally an hour. Add the celery only at the table, or it weeps and goes limp.
- YieldServes four as a lunch salad, six as a first course, one leaf-lined plate each.
Boiled dressings like this one were the ordinary American salad sauce of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: eggs, vinegar, a little cream and butter thickened over hot water, cheaper and more forgiving than an emulsified mayonnaise made by hand. Commercial jarred mayonnaise only pushed them aside from the 1910s and 1920s onward. Oysters were still cheap and shipped inland in barrels and tins, which is why a cookbook of the period could treat them as an everyday salad ingredient rather than a luxury. The pairing with celery was close to automatic in this period — celery salt in the dressing and diced celery in the bowl, both doing the work that lemon and herbs would do in a modern version.