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Oysters
Oysters are in season eight months in the year, he four "close" months being May, June, July, and August; the other months having the letter "r" in their spelling, accounts for the saying that oysters are in season when there is an "r" in the month. The oyster (ostrea edulis) is found on almost every coast, being especially cultivated in certain localities, and yielding enormous crops, as it is estimated that one oyster alone produces in one year from three to four thousand young. The system of cultivation has been brought to great perfection, and the superior kinds of oysters are carefully preserved from contamination with inferior sorts. Of the numerous kinds of oysters sold in our markets, it is only necessary to state that those possessing the smallest, smoothest and cleanest looking shells, from the high class native, down to the lowest types, are the best flavored. For serving plain, no oyster excels the blue points, but for cooking a coarser and cheaper kind may be used with almost as good results. Oysters must be kept alive, and as they are liable to fret and waste in substance while in captivity, they require frequent change of water, and occasional feeding or fattening as it is called. The following is the system usually adopted: Take some fresh oysters, put them in a tub of water, wash or scrub them with a birch or heather broom until they are quite clean, then lay them in an earthenware pan with the flat shell upwards; sprinkle them with flour or oatmeal, and cover with salted water (quite as salt as sea-water), bay salt being the best for this purpose. Change the salt water every day and sprinkle the oysters with oatmeal or flour, and they will fatten. Sometimes it is necessary to preserve oysters for culinary use, especially in localities where they are scarce or the supplies insufficient. When this is the case, the following will be found an excellent method of preparing them so that they will keep good, although not fresh, and be always ready for use.
Clean the oysters thoroughly, put them in a large saucepan with some sea-water, the juice of half a lemon, and some grated nutmeg. When the water is on the point of boiling move the saucepan off the fire, and leave the oysters in the liquor till the following day. Put them into stone or earthenware jars, pour over some clarified butter, and when cold, cover and tie the jars down; keep them in a cool place. Oysters should be kept in a very cold place, and should be thoroughly washed before they are opened; they should, according to the French custom, be opened on the deep shell so as to preserve their liquor; it is then advisable, if possible, to lay them on a bed of finely chopped ice for an hour or so before serving; this improves the flavor greatly, but they must not be left on the ice much longer, for after that time they will begin to lose flavor, instead of gaining it. Oysters, American Style Place in a sauce bowl one heaped teaspoonful of salt, three-fourths teaspoonful of very finely ground white pepper, one medium sized fine, sound, well peeled shallot, one heaped teaspoonful of chives, and one-half teaspoonful of parsley, all very finely chopped. Mix lightly together, and then pour in one teaspoonful of olive oil, six drops of Tobasco sauce, one saltspoonful of Worcestershire sauce, and lastly one gill (or five and one-half tablespoonfuls) of good vinegar. Mix it thoroughly with a spoon, and it is ready for use. A teaspoonful should be poured over each oyster just before eating.
Two different things sit on this page: a raw-bar sauce that is still worth making, and a nineteenth-century method for potting oysters under butter that no one should attempt. The notes below separate them.
- The potting method is the problemOysters brought only to "the point of boiling," left standing in their liquor overnight at an unspecified temperature, then sealed under a layer of clarified butter and stored in a "cool place" is a textbook anaerobic environment for Clostridium botulinum. No temperature, no acidity and no holding time are specified, and the fat cap excludes air while doing nothing to inhibit spores. Refrigeration does not make this safe, and the toxin gives no warning by smell or taste. If you want preserved oysters, buy them tinned or use a current tested recipe.
- The fattening tub, tooHolding live oysters in standing salted water and feeding them flour or oatmeal was normal practice when shellfish travelled slowly, but it kills them steadily and lets bacteria bloom in the water. Live oysters today keep best cupped-side down in a shallow dish under a damp cloth in the refrigerator, unsealed, and are eaten within a few days.
- Raw oysters and VibrioThe "r in the month" rule was about spawning texture and the absence of refrigeration, not safety as we now measure it. Vibrio vulnificus and V. parahaemolyticus are warm-water organisms present year-round in some waters; raw oysters are not advisable for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease, whatever the month.
- The sauce is sound"Oysters, American Style" is a shallot-and-vinegar mignonette with hot sauce in it, and nothing in it needs correcting. Make it an hour ahead so the shallot loses its raw edge.
- That gillOscar glosses one gill as five and a half tablespoons. A US gill is four fluid ounces, or eight tablespoons; the British gill is five fluid ounces, or ten. His figure matches neither, so take the parenthesis as the working measure: five and a half tablespoons, a generous third of a cup of vinegar.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the sauce carries about a quarter teaspoon of Worcestershire against a full heaped teaspoon of salt, which is aggressive by modern taste; start with half the salt and adjust.
- Bay saltCoarse solar-evaporated sea salt, not anything to do with bay leaves. Kosher or coarse sea salt is the equivalent where the text calls for it.
- The oyster he namesOstrea edulis is the European flat oyster. The blue points he recommends are Crassostrea virginica, the Atlantic oyster of Long Island Sound, so the Latin here is decorative rather than accurate.
- YieldThe sauce as written makes a little under half a cup, and at a teaspoonful per oyster that dresses about a dozen and a half to two dozen on the half shell.
Oscar Tschirky's oyster pages read like a house manual because that is what they were: the Waldorf served oysters at a moment when they were still cheap urban food, sold from cellars and street stands as well as from hotel dining rooms. The blue point he singles out took its name from Blue Point on Great South Bay, Long Island, and by the 1890s the term had spread so widely as a grade rather than an origin that New York State eventually legislated over its use. The keeping methods he records — scrubbing with a heather broom, fattening in changed salt water, potting under clarified butter — belong to the era before reliable refrigerated rail and ice-packed express shipping made all of it unnecessary; potted shellfish under a butter seal is a technique inherited from English cookery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a fat cap was the ordinary answer to the problem of keeping anything at all. The sauce, by contrast, is a straightforward mignonette dressed up with the two bottled condiments that had become fixtures of the American table by 1896, Tabasco and Worcestershire, which is probably why he called it American style.