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Oyster Cocktail in Green Peppers
Cut a cover off stem parts of six even-sized, sound green peppers, scoop out insides, remove seeds from covers as well as stems, and place in six small, deep oyster plates with shaved ice all around. Place fortyeight freshly opened small Bluepoint oysters in a bowl, add six drops Tabasco sauce, six tablespoons tomato catsup, a teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, half teaspoon freshly and very finely grated horseradish and two tablespoons Dumas sauce. Mix all well together, then evenly divide oysters in the six green peppers, place covers on and serve with a teaspoon on each plate.
A raw oyster cocktail dressed up as a table trick: the pepper is the glass. Nothing is cooked, so everything depends on the oysters and on keeping the whole assembly cold.
- Cold is the whole methodThe peppers are set in shaved ice and stay there until they reach the table. Chill the hollowed peppers, the sauce and the oysters separately, and dress the oysters at the last minute — left sitting in an acidic ketchup mixture they firm up and give up their liquor.
- Dumas sauceNot a sauce that survives in modern use, and its exact composition is unclear; the context suggests a spiced, probably tomato-based condiment. A commercial chili sauce, or a spoonful of ketchup sharpened with a little cider vinegar and cayenne, fills the same role in the mix.
- BluepointsSmall Long Island oysters, named for Blue Point on the Great South Bay, and sold small. Any small, mild, briny oyster works; forty-eight means eight per person, which is a generous first course. Buy them in the shell and shuck them yourself, or ask the fishmonger to shuck to order — pre-shucked oysters in tubs are meant for cooking.
- Sourcing raw shellfishBuy from a supplier who can show the harvest tag, keep the oysters at refrigerator temperature and use them the day you open them. Discard any shell that is open and does not close when tapped.
- The peppersChoose short, squat green bell peppers that sit flat; if a pepper rocks, shave a sliver off the base rather than cutting into the cavity. Blanching for thirty seconds and shocking in ice water softens the raw grassiness without collapsing the shell, though the original leaves them raw.
- Seasoning proportionsSix drops of Tabasco and half a teaspoon of horseradish across forty-eight oysters is restrained by modern taste. Mix the sauce first, taste it on its own, then fold in the oysters — once they are in, stirring to correct the seasoning tears them.
- Yield and serviceSix servings. Deep oyster plates and shaved ice are the point of the presentation; failing those, use small bowls set into a larger bowl of crushed ice. A teaspoon, as specified, not a fork.
The oyster cocktail is generally traced to San Francisco in the decades after the gold rush, where cold oysters in a spiced tomato dressing were served in a stemmed glass and the name borrowed from the bar. By the time this book appeared, the dish was a familiar opening course in American hotel and restaurant dining, and the variation tended to be in the vessel rather than the mixture — glasses, scooped tomatoes, hollowed lemons, blocks of ice, and here a green pepper with its stem cap replaced like a lid. The bottled sauces in the mixture — Tabasco, Worcestershire, tomato catsup and the now-vanished Dumas sauce — show what a professional kitchen kept on its condiment shelf.