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Oyster Salad (Dozen fresh oysters heads)
6 dozen fresh oysters. 6 heads of celery with part of their green tops. About half as much tender white cabbage. The mayonaise salad dressing. 1. Make the mayonaise with lemon juice instead of vinegar-or use the juice of 2 lemons, 1 tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar and a little pepper sauce or chili-vinegar.
After washing the celery and cabbage throw them into boiling salted water, let them boil not less than 5 nor more than 10 minutes, then drain and cover with cold water, then drain dry and chop them fine.
The green celery leaves acquire an intenser green in the boiling water, and chopped with the stalks and roots give a tinge to the whole. Drain the liquor from the oysters and bring it to a boil in order to remove the scum either by skimming or straining. After that add to it an equal quantity of good vinegar, a seasoning of broken pepper-corns, pepper sauce and salt, then put in the oysters and bring them just to the boiling point and no more. Shake the saucepan continually that the oysters may become set while cooking in round and plump shape. Then drain them from the liquor and set them away on a dish to become ice-cold.
When to be dished season the chopped celery, etc., with oil and vinegar, slightly, but well mixed in, spread a spoonful of it in the middle of each small dish, on that lay some oysters side by side, and on top another spoonful of the celery. Flatten the top slightly but don't smooth the sides. Pour the mayonaise over just thin enough to run.
The foregoing is not enough for the average orders of fifty persons. 2. Prepare the ingredients as above-but the allemande salad dressing or any other may be used as well.
Fry some outside leaves of lettuce, twice as many as you expect to use that you may select those which are the most like shells in shape and of the finest green-bronze color after frying. Good sweet lard should be used made hot in the potato fryer, but not smoking hot. The leaves take about a minute or two to fry green colored but dry. When done lay them hollow side down on baking sheets and let them drain perfectly in a hot place, then let them become cold. Shape little oyster (or lobster) salads in egg cups, and dish them up in these crisped lettuce leaves like a fish in a shell. Spread dressing over as usual.
This is restaurant writing: the quantities assume a hotel garde-manger filling individual orders, and the author says outright that six dozen oysters will not cover fifty covers. Scale down hard before you start.
- Yield and scalingThe recipe gives no yield beyond the remark that six dozen oysters will not stretch to fifty orders, so each portion is small. For four people something like a dozen and a half oysters, one large bunch of celery, a quarter of a small cabbage (the recipe wants about half as much cabbage as celery) and a cup or so of mayonnaise will do.
- "Heads of celery"A head of celery is what a supermarket sells as a bunch, root end and leafy tops included. The green leaves are not a garnish here; they are chopped in with the stalks to tint the whole mixture, so buy celery that still has its tops.
- The hinge: "just to the boiling point and no more"Oysters poached in the acidulated liquor need only the moment when the edges ruffle and the bodies plump, well under a minute once the pan is hot. Anything approaching a real simmer shrinks them to rubber, and the constant shaking is there to keep them rounding rather than slumping and sticking.
- Boiling the celery and cabbageFive to ten minutes in salted water is a long blanch by current taste and will leave the celery limp. Three to four minutes is enough to set the colour; then the cold water, and drain thoroughly, since wet vegetables will thin the mayonnaise on the plate.
- The oyster liquorBring the strained liquor to a boil and lift the scum, then add an equal volume of vinegar, as the recipe directs. That much acid is a lot by modern taste, so taste as you go; cider or white wine vinegar is gentler here than distilled.
- Pepper sauce and chili-vinegarChili-vinegar was vinegar steeped with small hot pods, and 'pepper sauce' of the period generally meant a thin bottled hot pepper preparation of the same family. Tabasco or any thin cayenne sauce stands in for both; a few drops go a long way in a cold dressing.
- Allemande dressingThe second version says the allemande salad dressing 'or any other may be used as well', so the recipe itself treats the choice as open. A cooked dressing or a plain mayonnaise both work; the choice does not change the method.
- Frying the lettuce leavesThe recipe asks only for fat that is hot but not smoking, in the potato fryer; judge it by eye rather than by a number. The leaves must be bone dry before they go in and, as the text says, take about a minute or two. Neutral oil replaces the sweet lard without loss.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseThe dressing is never heated and the salad is served cold. If you are cooking for anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, make the mayonnaise with pasteurized eggs.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men who ran American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the 1880s and 1890s, which is why the recipe counts in "average orders of fifty persons" and why it is drilled on appearance. Cooked oyster salad belonged to that moment when cheap, abundant Eastern oysters reached inland cities by rail. Poaching the oysters in their own liquor cut with an equal quantity of vinegar was as much practical as culinary in kitchens without reliable refrigeration. The second method, frying lettuce leaves into bronze-green shells to serve as edible dishes, is pure garde-manger showmanship of the period, when a cold buffet was judged first by the eye.