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Oyster Cocktail Sauce
Four tablespoonfuls tomato ketchup, juice ½ small lemon, teaspoonful tabasco sauce, tablespoonful finely Worcestershire sauce, ¼ teaspoonful grated horse-radish. Mix well
A fountain condiment rather than a cooked dish: five things stirred together in a glass and spooned over raw oysters. The only real decisions are heat level and how long it sits before serving.
- The garbled line"Tablespoonful finely Worcestershire sauce" is a typesetting error; the word after "finely" has dropped out, and since Worcestershire is a liquid, nothing needs to be finely anything. Read it as one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce.
- Scale back the tabascoA full teaspoon of hot sauce in roughly four tablespoons of ketchup is aggressive by modern palates. Start with a quarter teaspoon and build up.
- Horseradish"Grated horse-radish" means fresh root, which is sharper and less wet than jarred prepared horseradish in vinegar. If using the jar, a scant half teaspoon drained gets you closer, and expect its bite to soften as the sauce sits.
- Period ketchupCommercial ketchups of this era were often thinner, more vinegary and less sweet than the standard supermarket bottle. If yours tastes candied, a few extra drops of lemon juice pulls the sauce back into balance.
- YieldAbout six tablespoons, a scant half cup; enough to dress two or three cocktails of a few small oysters each. It doubles and triples without adjustment.
- Rest it coldMix and chill for fifteen to thirty minutes so the horseradish and Worcestershire stop tasting like separate ingredients. Serve the sauce very cold over oysters set in a stemmed glass on shaved ice, the way a fountain would.
- About the oystersThe sauce is safe; the shellfish it dresses is the part that needs care. Buy live oysters or shucked meats from a dealer with tags or a shipper number, keep them below 40F, and skip raw ones entirely for anyone pregnant, immune-compromised or with liver disease.
American fountains and lunch counters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sold far more than sodas: they had ice, glassware, a marble counter and a steady midday crowd, which made cold oysters served in a stemmed glass a natural line item, and books written for fountain operators often carried a page of sauces alongside the phosphates and sundaes. "Cocktail" here means the presentation rather than any liquor; the sense is commonly explained as coming from serving oysters upright in a small glass with a pungent dressing poured over them, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. The sauce itself is a period fingerprint: bottled ketchup, bottled Worcestershire and bottled pepper sauce were all cheap, shelf-stable and widely distributed by then, so a fountain man could produce a fashionable dish from three commercial bottles, a lemon and a knob of horseradish.