Oyster Sandwich
Chop raw oysters fine, add a dash of tabasco sauce, lemon juice, and oil. Season with pepper and salt.
Spread this on thinly cut slices of white bread, with a lettuce leaf between.
A raw oyster tartare on bread, from the era when oysters were cheap enough to chop. The whole thing hinges on the oysters being good ones, freshly opened.
- Shuck to orderOysters for this are best alive when opened and dressed within minutes. Pre-shucked tub oysters, which may be days old (and are sometimes pasteurised), will taste flat and turn watery once chopped and salted.
- Raw shellfish caveatUncooked oysters carry a real risk of Vibrio and norovirus, highest in warm months. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease should skip raw oysters entirely; a cooked filling is the sensible substitute.
- QuantityThe book gives none. Reckon on six to eight medium oysters per two rounds of sandwiches, which fills about four small slices.
- The oilIn this period "oil" on a table generally meant olive oil, usually a mild one sold for salads. A teaspoon or so is enough; more and the mixture slides out of the bread.
- Drain firstChopped oysters release liquor as they sit. Tip them into a sieve for a minute before dressing, or keep the liquor and use it to moisten the mixture instead of extra oil, or the bread will go through.
- TabascoThe sauce is close to what it was then, and a dash here is best read as two or three drops rather than a teaspoon. Its function is to lift the oysters, not to register as heat.
- Bread and lettuceThin white bread suggests a firm sandwich loaf cut thin, around a quarter inch. The recipe says nothing about butter, though buttering to the edges would help seal the crumb against the liquid. The lettuce leaf goes between filling and bread as a barrier as much as a garnish.
- Serve at onceThis does not stand. Make it, cut it, and put it on the table; after twenty minutes the bread is grey and damp.
Sandwich books proliferated in the early twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties and railway lunches all called for small filled bread and hostesses wanted variety beyond ham. Oysters belonged in that repertoire because they were still an everyday food in American cities rather than a luxury: East Coast beds supplied them by the barrel, and oyster cellars, stews and fries were ordinary cheap eating well into the 1900s before overharvesting and pollution thinned the beds and pushed prices up. The seasoning here — tabasco, lemon, oil, salt and pepper — is essentially the standard raw-bar dressing of the period transferred onto bread, and the lettuce leaf laid between filling and slice is a technique often recommended for any wet mixture.