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Salt (Grape fruit Cut grape fruit)
Grape fruit Cut grape fruit in halves crosswise, remove tough portions, and add oysters seasoned with Tabasco, lemon juice, and salt.
A first-course oyster cocktail served in a grapefruit shell, from the era when grapefruit itself was still a novelty on American tables. The whole thing is assembly work, and the only real technique is getting the fruit hollowed out cleanly.
- The hinge: nothing is cookedThe oysters go in raw and cold, and the acid from the lemon and grapefruit will firm their edges within minutes. Assemble immediately before serving; left to stand, the oysters turn opaque and slack and the fruit weeps into the shell.
- "Tough portions"That means the central core, the white pith, and the membrane walls between segments. Cut around each segment with a curved grapefruit knife, lift the flesh out, then pull the membrane free in one piece and return some of the fruit to the shell if you like.
- Quantities, which the book omitsReckon three to five small oysters per half grapefruit, a few drops of Tabasco, a teaspoon of lemon juice and a pinch of salt. One half per person as a first course; a large grapefruit gives two servings.
- Oyster sizeThe recipe says nothing about size. Shucked oysters sold by the pint were widely available in this period; use the smallest raw oysters you can get, or halve larger ones, so each spoonful carries fruit and oyster together.
- Sourcing raw oystersBuy from a dealer who can show the harvest tag, keep them below 40F until the moment of serving, and skip the dish entirely for anyone pregnant, elderly, immunocompromised or with liver disease. Warm-water Vibrio is the specific risk with raw shellfish, and no amount of lemon juice addresses it.
- Grapefruit has changedThe white-fleshed grapefruit of this period was generally more sour and more bitter than modern Ruby Red and its relatives. If your fruit is very sweet, hold back on the lemon juice and add a little more salt to keep the dish from tasting like dessert.
- Serving coldChill the hollowed shells and the oysters separately, and set the filled halves on crushed ice or in nested bowls. Room-temperature grapefruit and raw oysters is an unpleasant combination.
Grapefruit reached American breakfast and first-course menus late: commercial Florida groves only became significant in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the time this book was circulating the halved fruit in a stemmed glass was a marker of a fashionable table. Cookbooks of the period began treating the emptied shell as a container, filling it with other fruit, with sherbet, or — as here — with an oyster cocktail, a dish that spread onto restaurant menus in the later nineteenth century and was often served in a small glass with horseradish or chili sauce. Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the late 1860s, was the bottled pepper sauce most likely to be in a well-stocked pantry, and it appears in books of this generation wherever a cook wanted heat without the weight of a made sauce. The recipe is a fair snapshot of turn-of-the-century entertaining: little cooking, cold service, and an ingredient chosen partly because guests would notice it.