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Toledo Oyster Cocktail
Fill bottom of cocktail glass with ketchup, drop in 6 selected oysters and cover with teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce and ketchup. Top off with a little horse-radish. Serve with oyster fork and wafers.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, so the whole result depends on the oysters and on serving everything very cold.
- "Selected" oystersIn the trade this meant shucked oysters graded by size: "selects" fell between the smaller "standards" and the larger "counts," though the counts per measure varied by packer. Six medium shucked oysters is the intent; six large ones will overflow the glass.
- The glassA period cocktail glass held about 3 to 4 ounces — much smaller than a modern martini glass. Use a small stemmed glass or a squat tumbler so the oysters sit in the sauce rather than swimming.
- Ketchup of the periodKetchup then was generally thinner, sharper and less sweet than today's. Modern ketchup makes the glass cloying; cut it with lemon juice, or use a mix of ketchup and chili sauce, to get back to something acidic enough to carry raw oysters.
- Horse-radish"A little" means a little. Freshly grated horseradish is far hotter than the jarred, vinegared kind, and half a teaspoon is enough to bury six oysters if it is fresh.
- WafersThese are plain unsweetened crackers — oyster crackers or water biscuits — not sweet wafers. They are there to blot the sauce.
- TemperatureChill the glasses, the sauce and the oysters separately and build at the last moment. Assembled cocktails sitting on a fountain counter go slack and the oysters toughen in the acid.
- SourcingThe oysters are eaten raw, so buy them from a supplier who can name the harvest area and date, keep them at refrigerator temperature, and shuck them yourself as close to serving as possible. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised or with liver disease should not eat raw shellfish at all.
- YieldOne glass per person, served as a first course.
Oyster cocktails were a soda-fountain staple in the decades around 1900, when the fountain was not only a place for ice cream but a lunch counter competing with the saloon — the same bar equipment, the same small stemmed glassware, the same word "cocktail," and no liquor. Cheap rail-freighted barrels of shucked oysters, packed in ice, put shellfish on menus deep inland. The named-city convention here is largely marketing: fountain manuals of the era attached place names to minor variations in the sauce, and such "oyster cocktails" may differ only in whether the horseradish, the Worcestershire or the lemon leads. What the recipe records most clearly is the arrival of bottled ketchup and Worcestershire as ready-made flavour bases, letting a soda clerk with no cooking skill assemble a savoury course between sundaes.