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Salt (Tablespoon vinegar or lemon)
½ tablespoon vinegar or lemon 1 teaspoon celery, finely juice chopped ½ teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce Mix ingredients, chill thoroughly, and serve in cocktail glasses, or cases made from green peppers placed on a bed of crushed ice.
This is the seasoning mixture for a shellfish cocktail, and the page has come down to us in poor shape: two columns of the original have been read across as one, so the words run together and part of the ingredient list is missing. Read it carefully before you shop.
- Untangling the textSet out straight, the surviving list is: salt, ½ tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice, 1 teaspoon finely chopped celery, and 1½ teaspoons Worcestershire sauce. The word "juice" belongs to the lemon in the line above it, not to the celery.
- Something is missingAs printed the mixture is a thin, sharp seasoning rather than a sauce, and it will not coat anything. Cocktail sauces of this period often took in tomato catsup and horseradish, sometimes a few drops of Tabasco, and lines of that kind may well have gone missing with the second column.
- ScaleThe quantities are small, on the order of one serving, though the recipe states no yield and speaks of cocktail glasses in the plural. Multiply through for the number of glasses you intend to serve.
- Chill thoroughlyThis is the one instruction that carries. The sauce should be cold enough to be bracing when it meets the shellfish; an hour in the refrigerator, and the serving glasses chilled with it.
- Pepper casesCut green bell peppers across, remove the seeds and membrane, and trim the base flat so they stand. Blanch briefly and dry if you want them less aggressive.
- Crushed iceThe bed of ice is structural as well as decorative — it keeps raw shellfish at temperature on the table. Use a deep plate or shallow bowl so the glass or pepper case sits down into it rather than sliding.
- WorcestershireAnchovy-based and salty. Taste before adding the salt of the title.
The oyster cocktail was a fixture of American formal dinners from the 1890s onward, served as the first course in place of soup or melon — chilled shellfish in a stemmed glass. The name borrowed the glassware and the idea of a short, bracing opener from the bar. Worcestershire sauce, commercially bottled in England from the late 1830s, had by this date become a standard American pantry item and turns up wherever a savory edge is wanted. The green pepper case belongs to the same moment: turn-of-the-century cookery took a strong interest in edible containers, and vegetable cases, timbale shells and pastry croustades appear repeatedly as ways of presenting small cold dishes.