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Oyster Cocktail (Mix and beat well together)
Mix and beat well together a tablespoonful each of good tomato ketchup and of strained lemon juice, 7 drops of Tabasco sauce, ½ teaspoonful of 7 drops of Tabasco sauce, ½ teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce, a pinch of paprika and the same of salt, lastly stir in a teaspoonful of horse-radish. Have ready in small glasses 30 small oysters, which have been on ice for one hour. Divide them among the sauce, which has also been set on the ice until very cold. Put 5 oysters in each glass.
A soda-fountain oyster cocktail: the sauce is mixed cold, the oysters are chilled separately, and nothing is cooked. Everything depends on temperature and on the oysters themselves.
- The duplicated lineThe phrase "7 drops of Tabasco sauce, ½ teaspoonful of" is set twice, a compositor's repeat. Use 7 drops of Tabasco and ½ teaspoon of Worcestershire in total, not double.
- YieldThe sauce comes to roughly 2½ tablespoons and dresses 30 oysters in six glasses, five to a glass. That is about a teaspoon of sauce per serving, which is deliberate: this is a seasoning, not a pool of cocktail sauce.
- The hinge is coldBoth the oysters and the sauce are iced before they meet, and the book says so twice. A warm oyster cocktail tastes flabby and metallic. Chill the glasses too, and assemble at the last moment.
- Oysters and safetyThese are raw. Buy shellfish from a supplier who tags them for raw consumption, keep them below 40F throughout, and shuck them yourself if you can. Raw oysters carry a real Vibrio risk for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease, and no amount of lemon juice or Tabasco addresses it.
- "Small oysters"Thirty small oysters means genuinely small ones, such as Olympias or small Eastern oysters, not the large Gulf oysters sold shucked in tubs. If you can only get large ones, use ten to twelve and cut them, though the texture suffers.
- Ketchup then and nowMuch ketchup of this period was thinner, sharper, and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than the modern bottle, though commercial brands were already moving towards thicker and sweeter. Taste before adding the salt and consider a little extra lemon.
- Horse-radishFreshly grated root, or bottled prepared horseradish squeezed dry of its vinegar. Creamed horseradish sauce will slacken the cocktail and dull it. Stir it in last, as directed, so it keeps its bite.
- ServingSmall stemmed glasses, a fork or oyster pick, and lemon on the side. Serve immediately; the oysters will begin to firm and weep in the acid within a few minutes.
The oyster cocktail belongs to the era when the soda fountain was also a lunch counter, and it sits naturally alongside phosphates and egg drinks for exactly that reason: the apparatus a fountain already had -- shaved ice, chilled marble, small glasses, bottled sauces on the shelf -- suited a cold raw appetiser perfectly, and no range was needed. Oysters were still cheap, ubiquitous urban food in America at the turn of the century, sold by the barrel and eaten by the dozen at counters in every port and railroad town. The dish itself is generally traced to San Francisco in the 1860s, where it is often said to have been devised for miners, though the story is traditional rather than documented; by the 1890s the combination of ketchup, lemon, horseradish and pepper sauce appears to have been widely familiar in American cookbooks, and it is essentially the same mixture served with shrimp today.