Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Spiced Oysters
Spiced Oysters
Take a hundred fresh oysters, put them into a large earthenware pipkin together with their own liquor strained, half a nutmeg grated, eighteen cloves, four blades of mace, a teaspoonful of allspice, a very little cayenne pepper, one teaspoonful of salt and two tablespoonfuls of strong vinegar, and stir all these together with a wooden spoon. Put them in a moderately-heated oven or over a slow fire; take them from the fire several times and stir them thoroughly; as soon as they come to a boil pour them in a pan and let them stand all night in a cool place. They will be ready for eating next day.
A cold spiced oyster in its own liquor, meant to be made a day ahead. The whole dish turns on how briefly it sees heat.
- The hinge: stop at the first boilOysters are done the moment their edges ruffle, which happens well before the pot reaches a boil. Take the pan off the heat as soon as it begins to move and pour it out at once; carried further, the oysters shrink to erasers and no amount of standing overnight will soften them.
- A pipkinAn earthenware pot with a handle, used directly on the fire or in the oven. Any heavy non-reactive pan works — enamelled cast iron or stainless. Avoid bare aluminium or unlined copper, which react with the vinegar and the salt.
- A hundred oystersRoughly two to three quarts of shucked oysters with their liquor, depending on size. As an appetizer that might feed a dozen or more; scaling down to a dozen or two oysters is straightforward, dividing the spices in proportion.
- Strain the liquorNot fussiness. Shucking liquor carries shell chips and grit, and this dish is served cold in its own broth where every fragment is found.
- Oven heatA "moderately-heated oven" is usually read today as somewhere around 350F, but the figure is a modern approximation, not one the recipe supplies; the stovetop over low heat is easier to watch and is what the recipe offers as the alternative. Either way, stir and check often — taking it from the fire several times reads as a way of keeping the heat gentle and even.
- Blades of mace, and the restA blade is one piece of the dried aril from a nutmeg; if substituting ground mace, four blades is somewhere in the region of one to two teaspoons, and ground mace is better stirred in late than boiled. Half a grated nutmeg is about a teaspoon or so. The eighteen cloves are whole and can be fished out, or tied with the mace in a scrap of cheesecloth.
- "Strong vinegar""Strong" here means a sharp, undiluted vinegar rather than a specific acidity; period vinegar strength varied. Two tablespoons across this quantity of oysters is a seasoning, not a preservative — this is a spiced oyster, not a pickled one, and it will not keep like a pickle.
- Cooling and keeping"A cool place" meant a larder or icebox. Cool the pan quickly, cover, and refrigerate; eat within a day or two as the recipe intends. Cooked shellfish sitting overnight at room temperature is the one part of this that does not translate.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book catches New York at the tail end of its great oyster century, when beds off Staten Island and up the Chesapeake supplied the city so cheaply that oysters were street food as much as hotel food. Spicing them this way a brief cook in their own liquor with clove, mace, nutmeg and a little vinegar, then a night in the cold belongs to an older domestic tradition of "spiced" or "pickled" oysters that let a barrel-load be eaten over several days and, in stronger vinegar versions, shipped inland in kegs. The spice list, heavy on clove and mace and light on heat, is essentially the English pickling palate that American cookbooks had been printing since the eighteenth century; what Oscar seems to contribute, though this is more inference than record, is the Waldorf's scale, a hundred at a time, and perhaps the assumption that the kitchen has a cool room to leave them in overnight.