Home › Baked Fish › Raw Oysters
Raw Oysters
Raw oysters are served on oyster plates, or in a block of ice. Place block of ice on a folded napkin on platter, and garnish the base with parsley and quarters of lemon, or ferns and lemon. to hold the oysters. forms.
To Block Ice for Oysters. Use a rectangular piece of clear ice, and with hot flatirons melt a cavity large enough Pour water from cavity as rapidly as it Oyster Cocktail I 8 small raw oysters 2 drops Tabasco 1 tablespoon tomato catsup 1/2 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. 1 teaspoon celery, finely chopped. 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce.
The text as printed is garbled — lines from the ice-block instructions have been scrambled by the typesetting, and the oyster cocktail breaks off mid-ingredient. What survives is a service method rather than a cooked dish, and most of the work is in the presentation.
- Reading the scrambled textReassembled, the ice instructions run: use a rectangular piece of clear ice, melt a cavity in it with hot flatirons large enough to hold the oysters, and pour the water out of the cavity as rapidly as it forms. The stray phrases in the printed text belong to those sentences.
- FlatironsA flatiron is a solid cast-iron sadiron heated on the stove. Any heavy metal object heated until hot does the same job; the point is sustained heat pressed against the ice, not a flame.
- Clear ice"Clear ice" meant lake or manufactured block ice free of cloudy air pockets, which melts more evenly under a hot iron; a cloudy, bubble-filled block is likelier to crack. Directional freezing in an insulated cooler is the usual home method now, though a bar or florist's ice supplier is simpler.
- Oyster platesThese are the shallow china plates with five or six moulded depressions, popular on American tables in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A bed of crushed ice on any rimmed plate serves the same purpose: it holds the shells level so the liquor stays in them.
- The cocktail proportionsThe recipe as printed here breaks off after 8 small raw oysters, 2 drops Tabasco and 1 tablespoon tomato catsup; period oyster cocktails of this type usually continue with lemon juice or vinegar, horseradish and salt. Catsup of the day was thinner and sharper than modern ketchup, so adjust to taste.
- SourcingBuy from a dealer who can produce the shellfish tags, keep them cold and shucked no more than a few hours before serving, and discard any shell that will not close. Raw oysters carry a real Vibrio risk for anyone with liver disease, diabetes or a compromised immune system, and no amount of lemon or Tabasco reduces it.
- YieldThe cocktail is built on eight small oysters; the recipe as printed gives no yield, though a half-dozen to eight is the usual single first-course portion.
Serving raw oysters in a hollowed block of ice belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American dinner, when natural ice was cheap, delivered to the door, and worth showing off at table — the same impulse that produced ice swans and moulded ice pedestals in hotel dining rooms. Oysters themselves were still an everyday food rather than a luxury: the beds of Long Island Sound, the Chesapeake and Cape Cod supplied Boston in enormous quantity, and Fannie Farmer's book treats them as casually as it treats potatoes, with recipes for stews, fries, scallops and pies. The oyster cocktail was a newer arrival, generally traced to San Francisco in the 1860s or 1870s, and by the time of this edition the ketchup-and-Tabasco dressing had become standard enough to print without comment. Overharvesting and pollution thinned the beds within a generation, and by the 1920s the American oyster had begun its long shift from cheap staple to occasion food.