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Oyster Cocktail in Tomatoes
Neatly wipe six medium, even-sized red tomatoes, cut a cover off top of each, scoop out interiors and keep shells intact. Place each shell in centre of an oyster plate with clean-shaved ice all around. Place forty-eight freshly opened bluepoint oysters in a bowl, add six drops Tabasco sauce, six tablespoons tomato catsup, a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, half teaspoon fine, freshly grated horseradish, two tablespoons Dumas sauce, and mix all well together. Evenly divide oysters, etc., in the six shells, place covers on and serve with a teaspoon on each plate.
N. B. Place meat of tomatoes in the demi-glace pan.
A restaurant plate written for a brigade kitchen, which explains the oyster plates, the shaved ice and the closing note about the demi-glace pan. Everything here is assembly; the only cooking is the chilling.
- YieldSix servings, eight oysters each. Freshly opened oysters in the shell are what the recipe means, and what gives the cleaner liquor; if you substitute shucked oysters, count them rather than buying by volume, since counts per pint vary widely with grade.
- BluepointsOriginally oysters from Blue Point, Long Island; by 1900 the name was used loosely for any small, mild Atlantic oyster. Any small East Coast oyster works, four to eight per person depending on size.
- Dumas sauceNot a commercial product; a period sauce the book expects you to have made separately from its own sauce section. Without it, increase the catsup slightly and add a spoonful of chili sauce; note that this is a substitution, not the original.
- Tabasco and horseradishSix drops of Tabasco across forty-eight oysters is restrained by modern taste. Grated horseradish loses its pungency fairly quickly once cut, so grate it last; prepared horseradish from a jar is milder and wetter.
- The tomato shellsChoose firm, thick-walled tomatoes and salt the hollowed shells lightly, then invert them on a rack for ten minutes to drain. Otherwise they weep into the cocktail and thin the sauce.
- The demi-glace noteThat final line assumes a professional kitchen with a stockpot always going: the scooped tomato pulp goes into the brown sauce for body and acid. At home it belongs in a soup, a sauce, or the freezer.
- Cold mattersChill oysters, sauce, tomatoes and plates separately and combine at the last moment. Mixed and left standing, the salt in the catsup draws liquor from the oysters and the whole thing goes watery.
- Raw shellfishBuy from a source that can show harvest tags, keep the oysters below 40F until they are shucked, and serve immediately. Raw oysters carry a real Vibrio risk for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this plate is very much a Delmonico-era conceit: a dish whose point is its presentation. The oyster cocktail itself is an American invention of the second half of the nineteenth century, often said to have originated in San Francisco saloons of the 1860s, though the story is folklore rather than documented; oysters were served in a glass with a sharp tomato-and-horseradish dressing and became a fashionable first course in East Coast restaurants by the 1890s. Serving it inside a hollowed tomato, rather than a stemmed glass, is the sort of refinement that distinguished a hotel dining room from a chophouse. The parting instruction to send the tomato pulp to the demi-glace pan is the honest bookkeeping of a professional kitchen: nothing that could enrich a sauce was thrown away.