Home › Recipes › Oyster Salad (Quart of fresh oysters quart)
Oyster Salad (Quart of fresh oysters quart)
1 quart of fresh oysters. 1 quart of chopped celery. Either the hollandaise or the salad cream of the preceding receipt.
Drain the oysters from their liquor. Cut them in halves or quarters. Mix with the chopped celery and pour the dressing over.
Half lettuce and half celery will answer for the preceding, or tender white cabbage may be used. Oyster salad is in demand.
A late-Victorian buffet salad that assumes you have a barrel of shucked oysters and a bowl of dressing already made. The proportions are sound; the handling needs thought.
- What a quart of oysters isA quart of shucked oysters is roughly a pound and a half to two pounds once drained, somewhere between two and three dozen medium oysters depending on size. Buy them shucked in their liquor from a fishmonger rather than shucking three dozen yourself.
- The hinge: drain hard, then chillOyster liquor will thin any dressing to soup within minutes. Drain in a sieve for a good ten minutes, blot the oysters, and keep everything below 40F until it goes to the table. Dress no more than half an hour before serving.
- Raw oystersNothing here is cooked. Use only oysters sold for raw consumption, from a tagged, dated lot, and skip the dish entirely for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease, for whom Vibrio vulnificus is a serious risk. Some period recipes plumped the oysters in their own liquor first; this one does not.
- The dressingThe 'preceding receipt' is not reproduced here, but a period hollandaise or 'salad cream' of this sort was generally a cooked dressing rather than a raw-yolk mayonnaise. If you substitute mayonnaise, roughly a cup should dress this quantity; a cooked dressing coats better and holds up longer on a buffet.
- CeleryA quart of chopped celery is best taken as the pale inner ribs and heart, cut small. Outer ribs from a modern supermarket bunch are stringier than the blanched celery of the period and should be peeled or left out.
- The substitutionsHalf lettuce and half celery, or tender white cabbage, both work, but lettuce collapses fast under a heavy dressing. Cabbage is the better keeper if the salad has to sit.
- YieldServes ten to twelve as a first course, or twenty as one dish on a spread.
Oyster salad belonged to the American banquet table of the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap, abundant, and shipped inland by rail in sealed cans and ice-packed kegs. Cookbooks of the period treat them as a pantry staple rather than a luxury, and the salad appears as standard cold-buffet fare. Celery was a common companion: celery was itself a fashionable, expensive vegetable, grown blanched and served in tall cut-glass vases, and its crispness offset the soft oysters. The closing line, "Oyster salad is in demand," is the author writing to a professional reader who needed to know what would sell. The dish faded as the Atlantic oyster beds declined across the early twentieth century, when pollution, overharvesting, and typhoid scares turned a penny food back into an expensive one.