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Oyster Cocktail
Open half a dozen small oysters and drop them with the juice into a wine glass; add a little lemon juice, three drops of Tobasco sauce, a teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce and one dessertspoonful of tomato catsup, stir well and serve. Horseradish may be served on the side.
A single-serving raw oyster cocktail from the Waldorf's bar-adjacent repertoire, assembled rather than cooked. The sauce is built in the glass, so proportions and oyster quality are everything.
- The oysters are the whole dishBuy live, tightly closed oysters from a supplier with turnover, keep them cold, and shuck them to order. Reserve every drop of liquor, which is the only liquid in the glass besides the sauces and lemon.
- Raw shellfish and who should skip itRaw oysters carry a real risk of Vibrio and norovirus. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease should not eat them raw, whatever the sauce.
- "A wine glass"A small stemmed glass, not a modern balloon; as a period measure a wineglass was usually reckoned at about two fluid ounces, though as a serving vessel here it need only hold six little oysters and their juice. A small coupe or sherry glass will do.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, or a scant tablespoon. A teaspoonful of Worcestershire against two teaspoons of catsup is a sharper, thinner sauce than the ketchup-heavy cocktail sauce sold today.
- Tobasco and catsupThe printed "Tobasco" is a misspelling of Tabasco, McIlhenny's pepper sauce, broadly the same style of product still sold. Catsup is tomato ketchup, though period brands were generally thinner and more vinegary than Heinz is now, so cut back slightly if yours is very sweet.
- "Small oysters"Kumamotos, Olympias, or small Blue Points. Large oysters chopped down do not work here; the point is to swallow each one whole with its share of sauce.
- ServingOne glass serves one person as a first course. Set the glass in a bowl of crushed ice and mix the sauce no more than a minute or two before it goes out, or the lemon juice begins to firm and cloud the oysters.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and this cocktail belongs to the moment when "cocktail" was expanding beyond the bar to mean any small, sharp thing served at the start of a meal in a stemmed glass. Oyster cocktails are, by tradition, traced to San Francisco in the 1860s, where the tiny native Olympia oyster is said to have been served in a glass with a spiced tomato dressing; Tschirky's version, with its Worcestershire, Tabasco and catsup, is recognizably close to what would later be known as American cocktail sauce. That it appears at all is a reminder of how cheap and abundant oysters were in New York before the beds of the Hudson and Long Island were fished out and closed to pollution in the early twentieth century.