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Oyster Salad Sandwich
Chop fine two stalks of celery and one medium sized cucumber; add one cup of cold cooked oysters cut in pieces, mix with one-half cup of cream dressing. Place on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A filling of the sort that assumes leftovers on hand — cold poached or fried oysters from the day before. Two things decide whether it works: the water in the cucumber and the thickness of the dressing.
- Salt and drain the cucumberChopped raw cucumber releases a surprising amount of liquid within minutes and will turn the bread to paste. Toss the chopped cucumber and celery with a pinch of salt, let stand 10 minutes, then press dry in a towel before mixing.
- "Cream dressing"In books of this period the name usually points to a cooked or boiled dressing — egg yolks, milk or cream, vinegar, a little flour or mustard, thickened over heat and cooled — though the same name is sometimes used for an uncooked dressing of cream with vinegar and seasoning. Either way it is not whipped cream and not modern bottled mayonnaise. Any thick homemade mayonnaise or boiled dressing stands in for it; thin dressings will soak through.
- Cooking the oystersIf you are starting from raw, poach shucked oysters in their own liquor just until the edges ruffle, about 2 minutes, then cool. Prolonged boiling makes them tough and rubbery.
- Quantity of oystersOysters shrink appreciably in cooking, so roughly a pint of shucked raw oysters will give about the cup of cut-up cooked oysters called for; the number of oysters in a pint varies a good deal with their size.
- Cut the pieces smallOyster is slippery and will slide out of a sandwich in whole lobes. Chop to roughly the size of the diced celery so the dressing binds everything into one mass.
- YieldThe filling makes roughly 2 cups once the vegetables are drained — enough for several sandwiches cut from thin-sliced white bread, or a larger number of small tea-sandwich fingers with the crusts off.
- Assemble lateThis is a wet filling with no keeping quality. Mix and fill within an hour of serving, keep chilled, and butter the bread right to the edges to slow the soaking.
Oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why American cookbooks of the period treat them as an everyday protein rather than a luxury — creamed, fried, scalloped, in patties, and here in a salad. The sandwich itself is a small piece of evidence about the era's fashion for "salad" as a category applied to almost anything bound with a dressing: chicken salad, lobster salad, sweetbread salad, all built on the same cooked dressing and all liable to end up between thin slices of buttered bread for a luncheon or afternoon tea. The lettuce leaf laid between filling and bread reads less as garnish than as engineering — plausibly a way of keeping a moist filling off the crumb, though that is an inference from the recipe rather than a documented practice.