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Oyster Cocktail in Green Pepper Cups
1 pint oysters 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 1/4 teaspoon curry powder 1/2 teaspoon celery salt shake of paprika 1/4 teaspoon mustard 2 tablespoons tomato catsup 1 teaspoon chili sauce 6 small green peppers Add to the oysters and the oyster liquor, the lemon juice, salt and pepper and just bring to a boil. Cool. Add the other ingredients to the catsup, then stir into oysters and chill well. Cut slice from ends of peppers, and remove all seeds and membrane. Serve oysters and sauce in the pepper cups. Cocktail glasses may be used. Serves 6.
A cooked oyster cocktail from the era when shellfish cocktails were dressed with curry powder and served in something other than a glass. The whole dish depends on pulling the oysters off the heat the instant the liquor moves.
- The hinge: heat, don't cook"Just bring to a boil" means exactly that — the moment the liquor shows the first break of bubbles and the oyster edges ruffle, take the pan off the burner. Thirty seconds beyond that and the oysters tighten into erasers, and no amount of chilling will soften them again.
- A pint of oystersThis means shucked oysters sold in their liquor, roughly 16 fl oz, which is about 20–24 small oysters or a dozen large ones. If you buy them in the shell you will need several dozen small oysters to yield a pint, and reserve every drop of liquor as you shuck, since it carries the seasoning.
- Catsup and chili sauceCatsup is ordinary tomato ketchup. Chili sauce in a book of this period is the thick, sweet-sour tomato relish sold alongside ketchup — not a hot pepper sauce. Substituting sriracha or similar will overwhelm the quarter teaspoon of curry powder that gives this its character.
- Mixing order mattersThe instruction to stir the seasonings into the catsup first is not fussiness: powdered seasonings such as curry, and dry mustard if that is what is meant here (the recipe says only "mustard"), clump in a thin cold liquid but disperse smoothly in something viscous. Make the sauce as a paste, then loosen it with the cooled oysters and their liquor.
- Green pepper cupsChoose short, squat bell peppers that will sit flat, take a thin slice off the end as directed, and hollow them out. Leave them raw and crisp — the recipe gives no instruction to blanch. Chill the shells alongside the oysters; a warm pepper against cold sauce is the one thing that spoils the effect.
- ChillingCool the oysters uncovered until they stop steaming, then refrigerate until thoroughly cold, as the recipe's "chill well" requires. Cooked shellfish in a wet dressing should not sit at room temperature while you assemble; hold everything cold and fill the cups just before serving.
- Yield and serviceSix portions as written, which is a first course rather than a salad. Set each pepper in a shallow bowl of crushed ice so it cannot topple, with cocktail forks and a wedge of lemon.
The oyster cocktail is generally traced to the saloons and oyster bars of nineteenth-century San Francisco, where shucked oysters were served in a glass with a sharp tomato dressing, and by the end of the century the catsup-horseradish-lemon line was familiar in American cookbooks. What is distinctive about this version is everything around the oyster: the curry powder and celery salt, the Worcestershire and chili sauce layered on top of the catsup, and above all the decision to abandon the stemmed glass for a hollowed green pepper. The vegetable case — pepper cups, tomato cases, cucumber boats, scooped grapefruit halves — was a cheap route to a table that looked designed, and it is presentation as much as flavour that is being sold here. The oysters are also cooked rather than served raw, which sets this apart from the standard raw oyster cocktail.