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Oyster Salad
Clean two heads of celery, leaving a little of the green part on, and put them into a saucepan with half their bulk of tender white cabbage. Pour over sufficient boiling salted water to cover and boil for five minutes. Take out, place them on a colander to drain and mince very fine. Put the strained liquor from two dozen oysters into a saucepan, boil and skim it, add a little vinegar, bruised peppercorns and salt. Put in the oysters and cook slowly for a few minutes until done, take them out and turn them into a basin packed in ice to cool; add a little oil and vinegar to the chopped celery and cabbage, spread some of it over a dish, arrange the oysters on it, putting them close together, cover with the remainder of the mixture, smooth it over with a knife, pour over a little mayonnaise sauce, and serve.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, built in layers on a flat dish. The one thing to get right is the oysters: they are poached, not boiled, and they turn to rubber in the time it takes to look away.
- Cook the oysters barely at all"cook slowly for a few minutes until done" means until the edges just ruffle and the bodies firm slightly, in liquor kept gentle rather than at a rolling boil. Anything past that and they shrink and toughen, and no amount of mayonnaise will hide it.
- "Two heads of celery"A head of celery is what a supermarket sells as a bunch or stalk, about 1 lb. Two heads plus half their bulk in cabbage gives a large quantity of minced vegetable; for four servings, one head and a wedge of cabbage is closer to sensible.
- Oyster liquorTwo dozen shucked oysters yield perhaps half a cup of liquor, often less, and it can carry grit — strain it through a fine sieve or a damp cloth, as the recipe directs. Shucked oysters sold by the pint come packed in their own liquor; a pint holds somewhere between a dozen and two dozen depending on size.
- Vinegar and peppercorns are unmeasured"A little vinegar" in a poaching liquor of this size means a teaspoon or two; enough to sharpen the liquor, not to pickle. Bruised peppercorns means whole ones cracked under a pan; they stay behind in the liquor when the oysters are lifted out.
- The five-minute boil is a blanchCelery and cabbage go into boiling salted water only long enough to lose their raw edge and their bite. Drain them thoroughly and press out the water before mincing, or the dressing will slide off and the dish will weep on the plate.
- "Packed in ice" means chilled fastTurning the oysters into a basin set in ice stops the carryover cooking immediately. A bowl set in ice water does the same; refrigeration alone is too slow and the oysters keep cooking in their own heat.
- Mayonnaise sauceIn this kitchen that is a made mayonnaise, thinned to pouring consistency, not a set spoonable one. If the raw yolk is a concern for anyone at the table, a commercial mayonnaise loosened with a little lemon juice pours the same way.
- Yield and serviceAs written it serves four to six as a first course. It is assembled in a shallow dish and cut or spooned out in wedges; it does not survive being tossed, and it is best built shortly before serving.
Oyster salads belong to a moment when oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten in enormous quantity in American cities — the beds of Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake supplied New York restaurants by the barrel. Cook books drawn from hotel service in the 1890s, Oscar Tschirky's among them, are full of this kind of layered cold entrée: vegetables blanched and minced very fine, a protein arranged "close together" in a single stratum, the whole smoothed with a knife and masked with mayonnaise. It belongs with the chaud-froids and aspic moulds of the period. Celery was a fashionable vegetable in nineteenth-century America, served raw in tall glass vases on the table, though by the end of the century large-scale cultivation had brought its price down.