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Oyster Cock Tail
Put six small oysters in a cocktail glass; add one tablespoonful of each, tomato catsup, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and shaved ice, a pinch of salt, two dashes of tabasco sauce. One teaspoonful of grated horseradish may be added if liked. Put a small piece of white celery on top and serve.
A raw oyster cocktail of the kind that opened American hotel dinners for decades. It is more sauce than most modern palates expect, so read the proportions before you pour.
- The sauce is overdressed by modern standardsA tablespoon each of catsup, lemon juice and Worcestershire against six small oysters buries them entirely. Two teaspoons of catsup, two of lemon juice and a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire gives a sauce that still reads as sharp without erasing the oyster.
- Catsup in 1900Period catsup -- Commercial tomato catsup of this era was generally thinner, more vinegary and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than today's ketchup, which tends to be sweeter. Cut the sugar impression with a little extra lemon, or use a plain passata-based cocktail sauce base.
- Shaved iceThe ice here is an ingredient, not a chiller: it melts into the sauce and thins it. Modern practice is to bed the glass in crushed ice rather than mix ice through the oysters, which keeps the sauce from turning watery within a minute.
- Small oysters"Small" here simply means bite-size; the market oysters of the period, such as Blue Points or Rockaways, were on that scale. If your oysters are large Pacifics, use three or four and cut them, or the cocktail becomes unmanageable with a fork.
- Raw oysters and sourcingNothing here is cooked. Buy oysters from a dealer who can show harvest tags, keep them below 40F, shuck to order, and be aware that Vibrio infection is a real risk for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease. Lemon juice and tabasco do not sterilise anything.
- Tabasco and horseradishTwo dashes reads as a lot against six small oysters; start with one. The teaspoon of grated horseradish is optional in the original -- use fresh-grated or drained bottled rather than a creamed horseradish sauce, which will slacken the dressing.
- Yield and serviceOne cocktail glass per person, served as a first course. A stemmed coupe or small wine glass set in a shallow bowl of ice is the closest modern equivalent to the period's cocktail glass.
The oyster cocktail belongs to the American restaurant boom of the 1880s and 1890s, when cheap rail-shipped ice slowed spoilage enough to make raw shellfish a practical inland offering and hotel dining rooms needed a smart, cold opener for a long table d'hôte menu. Its origin is often traced to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, though the story is traditional rather than documented; what is certain is that by the time this book appeared the dish was standard in American cookery collections, and the tomato-and-horseradish sauce it carries is often said to be the ancestor of the modern shrimp cocktail sauce.