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Oyster Cocktails
For each person, allow the juice of one-half of a lemon, one-half of a teaspoonful of vinegar, three drops of tabasco sauce, one-half of a teaspoonful of tomato catsup and eight medium-sized oysters. Serve in glasses with oyster forks.
A raw oyster cocktail of the plainest sort: the sauce is mixed in the glass and the oysters dropped in. Everything depends on the oysters themselves.
- The hinge: shuck to orderOysters for this should be opened within an hour of serving and kept cold on ice, with their liquor. Pre-shucked tub oysters are packed for cooking and will taste flat and slightly metallic served raw.
- Proportions per glassHalf a lemon's juice is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons, so each serving is about that much lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon ketchup and three drops of Tabasco. That is a sharp, thin, mostly citrus dressing, not the thick red cocktail sauce of later decades.
- Catsup in 1900Catsup of the period -- Tomato catsup of the period was generally thinner, more vinegary and less sweet than modern ketchup. If you use a standard supermarket ketchup, cut back slightly or add a little more vinegar to keep the balance.
- Oyster size"Medium-sized" points to the smaller Eastern oysters then sold in American markets rather than anything as large as today's farmed oysters. Eight per person reads as a first course; with modern oysters five or six is plenty.
- Assembly and servingMix the lemon, vinegar, catsup and Tabasco in the bottom of a chilled stemmed glass, add the oysters, and give them a moment in the sauce before serving. Serve in a glass set into a bowl of crushed ice, with a small fork.
- Sourcing and who should skip itBuy from a merchant who can show the harvest tag, keep the oysters below 40F throughout, and discard any that are open and will not close. Raw shellfish is not appropriate for pregnant women, young children, the elderly, or anyone immunocompromised or with liver disease.
The oyster cocktail belongs to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when American oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten in quantities that now seem improbable — oyster saloons were a fixture of every eastern city. The form is often traced to San Francisco in the 1860s, where a small glass of raw oysters in a tart dressing was served, though the story is traditional rather than documented; by the 1890s the cocktail glass of raw oysters appears to have become a standard opener at hotel dinners across the country. The recipe also records the arrival of two industrial condiments in the home kitchen: bottled tomato catsup and Tabasco, the Louisiana pepper sauce sold commercially since the 1860s, both of which turn up constantly in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks as shortcuts to sharp flavor.