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Grill Room Oyster Sandwich
Toast three slices of white bread and lightly butter. Place fried oysters between the slices and dust lightly with pepper and salt. Cut in strips and serve on a lettuce leaf. Remove contents of half an orange peel and fill with chili sauce. Serve on the plate with the sandwich.
A double-decker club built on fried oysters, from an era when a grill room menu meant fast, hot food served at the counter. The book assumes you already know how to fry an oyster; almost everything that can go wrong here happens at that step.
- The oysters are the hingeShucked oysters are drained, patted dry, dipped in egg and then cornmeal or fine cracker crumbs, and fried in fat at about 375F for roughly 1 to 2 minutes, until the crust colors. Anything longer and they shrink and toughen; the interior only needs to be hot.
- Buy them shuckedStandards or selects in a tub, drained well, are what this calls for. Wet oysters will steam rather than crisp, so dry them thoroughly before breading and let the breaded oysters rest a few minutes so the coating sets.
- Three slices means a clubTwo layers of oysters between three slices of toast, cut into strips rather than triangles. Butter the inner faces of the middle slice on both sides so the toast does not go soggy from the oyster liquor.
- "Chili sauce" is not hot sauceIn American cookbooks of this period chili sauce is a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish with onion, vinegar and warm spice, closer to a coarse ketchup than to anything from a dash bottle. A chunky tomato-based cocktail sauce is the nearest supermarket equivalent.
- The orange-peel cupHalve an orange, juice it, and scrape the membrane clean with a spoon so you are left with an intact hemisphere of peel. It is a serving dish, not an ingredient, though the oil in the zest does scent the sauce slightly.
- Toast timingToast and butter the bread while the oysters are draining, not before, so the toast is still warm when the oysters go on.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Three slices of bread suggests a single sandwich; six to eight oysters will fill two layers, and it can be cut into three or four strips as a lunch plate for one, or smaller as savories for two or three.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book is generally credited to Eva Greene Fuller and dates from the first decade of the twentieth century, when the sandwich was moving out of the tea tray and onto the restaurant menu. The "grill room" of the title was a real institution: the informal, often basement-level dining room of a hotel or club, where men ate quickly at a counter and chops, oysters and rarebits came off a broiler or out of a fry kettle in minutes. Fried oysters were cheap and widely available on American coasts and rail lines at the time, and they show up in this period as loaves, fries, stews and sandwiches alike; the triple-decker construction here resembles the club sandwich, though any direct link between the two is not documented. The hollowed orange filled with chili sauce is a bit of plating showmanship costing nothing but a minute's work, and chili sauce was then a widely home-canned tomato relish.