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Oyster Cocktail (Seven small oysters ounces)
Seven small oysters, 1½ ounces Snyder's oyster cocktail sauce, 1 dash tabasco sauce, 2 Saratoga flakes. Serve in large sherbet or sundae glass sauce on top of oysters, do not mix. with ¼ of lemon on side, put cocktail
A single-serving fountain item, printed with its lines scrambled — read it as: seven oysters in the glass, sauce spooned over without stirring, tabasco, crackers and lemon alongside. Almost everything here is assembly; the only real decisions are the oysters and the sauce.
- The text is jumbledThe typesetting has run the instructions together out of order. The sense is: serve in a large sherbet or sundae glass, put the cocktail sauce on top of the oysters, do not mix, with a quarter of a lemon on the side.
- Oyster sourcing is the hingeThese are served raw and cold. Buy only oysters tagged for raw consumption from a reputable fishmonger, keep them at refrigerator temperature until the moment of serving, and discard any that do not close or that smell of anything but the sea. Vibrio risk rises with warm water and warm handling, and anyone immunocompromised, pregnant, or with liver disease should not eat raw oysters at all.
- Snyder's oyster cocktail sauceEvidently a bottled proprietary sauce of the period, not now obtainable under that name. Any standard seafood cocktail sauce stands in — tomato ketchup or chili sauce sharpened with horseradish, lemon juice and a little Worcestershire.
- 1½ ouncesRead as a fluid measure, roughly 3 tablespoons. That is a generous quantity of sauce for seven small oysters.
- Saratoga flakesA branded flaked soda cracker sold at the time. Thin oyster crackers or plain water crackers serve the same purpose. Not to be confused with Saratoga chips, the fried potato slices, though either would sit happily on the saucer.
- "Small oysters"Seven small shucked oysters. With larger oysters the count would need to be reduced.
- The glassA footed sherbet or sundae glass, as specified; served cold.
- YieldOne portion, meant as an appetizer or light counter lunch.
Soda fountains in the early twentieth century were not confined to sweets; as drugstore counters grew into lunch counters they took on sandwiches, salads, bouillon and shellfish, and an oyster cocktail was the natural fit — no cooking, no range, only ice, glassware and a bottle of sauce. The oyster cocktail itself is generally traced to San Francisco in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1900s it appears on hotel and restaurant menus across the country as a standard first course. Its arrival in a soda book, with a named brand of bottled sauce and a named brand of cracker, shows how thoroughly the fountain trade ran on prepared goods: the operator's skill lay in assembly, chilling and presentation rather than cookery, and the instruction not to mix the sauce into the oysters is a presentation note, keeping the red cap visible above the glass.