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Hot Oyster Juice
Take 1 ounce of fresh juice from oysters, and a tablespoonful of cream, fill the mug with hot water, add a small piece of butter and season with pepper and salt. Serve with soda
This is a hot fountain drink from the era when the drugstore soda counter sold restorative broths alongside phosphates. It cannot be made safely today, and the reason is the oyster liquor itself.
- Raw oyster liquor is the problemThe recipe never cooks the oyster juice. An ounce of cold liquor topped with hot water in a mug may not reach, and will certainly not hold, a temperature that would make it safe, and it cools further the moment cream and butter go in. Nothing in the method reliably brings the shellfish liquid to a safe temperature at any point.
- What the liquor can carryOyster liquor is the same fluid the live animal filtered its water through, and it concentrates whatever the animal concentrated. Vibrio vulnificus and Vibrio parahaemolyticus, norovirus and hepatitis A are all associated with raw oysters and their liquor. Vibrio vulnificus infection is particularly dangerous for anyone with liver disease, diabetes or a compromised immune system.
- "Fresh juice from oysters"This means liquor drained from oysters shucked on the premises. How long such liquor was held, and at what temperature, is not stated; any extended holding would compound the first hazard.
- Hot water is not a cook stepWater from a fountain urn is below boiling by the time it hits a room-temperature mug, and the mug size is unspecified: a typical fountain mug would give something on the order of one part liquor to eight or ten parts water. This is a warming drink, not a cooked one. Treat any recipe that heats seafood only by dilution as raw.
- If you want the drinkHot clam and oyster broths do exist in current form, made from shellfish simmered properly and strained. Use a modern recipe rather than adapting this one.
- "Serve with soda"This most likely means a glass of plain carbonated water served alongside rather than soda added to the mug, though the recipe does not say.
American soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were attached to drugstores, and their menus reflected it: the same counter that poured sarsaparilla and egg phosphates also sold beef tea, malted milk, clam bouillon and hot oyster stock as mild restoratives for winter customers. Oysters were then cheap, abundant and shucked in enormous volume in eastern cities. Drinks like this one sit at the point where the pharmacy and the lunchroom overlapped, before the two functions separated and before shellfish handling came under any consistent regulation. The seasoning of butter, pepper and salt marks it clearly as a savoury tonic rather than a treat, in the same family as the hot beef tea that fountain guides of the period list.