No. 2642

Oyster Salad

Salade d'Huitres

Half-fill a salad bowl with white and finely cut lettuce leaves; place on top some pickled oysters cut in two or three pieces, and cover with a layer of mayonnaise sauce (No. 606). Decorate the top with lobster coral, beetroot, pickled cucumbers, capers, hard-boiled eggs and small pickled oyster crabs, or else use young pepper grass, two inches long, and well washed. (This cress can be sown in pots and will grow during the whole season; the smaller the plant the better and stronger is the taste.)

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooked one: everything depends on the quality of the pickled oysters and the mayonnaise, and on keeping the salad cold until it goes to the table. Ranhofer cross-references his own numbered recipes, so a few substitutions are needed.

Pickled oystersRanhofer means oysters poached briefly in their own liquor, then steeped in a spiced vinegar brine — not raw oysters in acid. They are hard to buy now; a jar of good smoked or brined oysters, drained, is the nearest ready substitute, or poach shucked oysters just until the edges curl (about a minute) and cool them in seasoned vinegar for a day in the refrigerator.
Mayonnaise No. 606Ranhofer's cross-reference is to his own mayonnaise sauce, i.e. a hand-whisked emulsion of egg yolks and oil with vinegar or lemon and seasoning. Since nothing here is cooked afterwards, use pasteurized eggs if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, or use a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice.
Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral red when cooked. It is pushed through a sieve and scattered as a garnish. If you are not breaking down whole lobsters, skip it — paprika is a colour substitute but not a flavour one.
Oyster crabsThe tiny soft-shelled commensal crabs found inside living oysters, sold in period New York markets and eaten whole. They are very hard to come by today; leave them out rather than hunting for them.
Pepper grassPeppergrass here is almost certainly garden cress (Lepidium sativum), the seedling sold as cress in punnets. Ranhofer says the smaller the plant the stronger the taste; cut it at two inches, as he says, and wash it well, since it is grown in soil or damp fibre and holds grit.
BeetrootCooked and peeled beet, cut small. Dress or blot it separately and add it at the last moment, or it will bleed pink through the mayonnaise.
Assembly and yieldBuild it just before serving, since dressed lettuce collapses quickly under mayonnaise. Ranhofer gives no yield; a salad bowl built this way will serve a small table, and the dish belongs among his salads rather than as a main course.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked in some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and an oyster salad sits squarely in that world: oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten at every level of the American table, while mayonnaise, lobster coral and a border of capers and hard-boiled egg mark the dish as restaurant work in the French manner. Pickled oysters were a staple of nineteenth-century American larders and supper tables — they kept for weeks in their spiced vinegar and travelled well, which is why they show up in cookbooks from Philadelphia to Charleston long before refrigeration. The oyster crabs are the period detail hardest to recover: those pinhead crabs live inside living oysters, and were chiefly fried as a luxury garnish, a habit that faded with the collapse of the great East Coast oyster beds in the early twentieth century.