Home › Salads › Oyster Salad (Let a pot of water boil hard)
Oyster Salad (Let a pot of water boil hard)
Let a pot of water boil hard. Take the oysters from the liquor and let them just boil hard, having put a little salt in the water. Drain in colander and spread them out to dry. Put them in layers with lettuce and celery, and cover with mayonnaise dressing.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know what shucked oysters look like when they are done. The whole dish hinges on not overcooking them.
- "Just boil hard"Drop the drained oysters into hard-boiling salted water and lift them out the moment the edges ruffle and the bodies plump — roughly 30 seconds to a minute. Anything approaching a few minutes turns them tough and shrunken, and no amount of mayonnaise disguises it.
- Work in batchesA large quantity of cold oysters will drop the water off the boil and they will stew rather than poach. Two dozen at a time in a wide pot is a sensible limit.
- The liquorThe recipe discards it, but the strained liquor is worth keeping for a chowder or a sauce. If you want more flavour in the salad itself, poach the oysters in their own liquor topped up with water rather than in plain salted water.
- Dry them properly"Spread them out to dry" is not a throwaway line. Wet oysters will thin the mayonnaise into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. Spread them on a towel or rack and chill them thoroughly before assembling.
- Mayonnaise dressingThis would have been a hand-beaten egg-yolk-and-oil mayonnaise rather than anything jarred, and period versions tend to be thicker and sharper than the modern commercial product. Loosening a commercial mayonnaise with lemon juice and a little cream gets close.
- AssemblyLayered, not tossed — the oysters are the point and should stay whole. Cut the celery fine and use crisp lettuce hearts; softer leaves collapse under the dressing.
- QuantityNo yield is given. As a rough guide, a quart of shucked oysters with two or three heads of lettuce and a small bunch of celery would serve about six as a first course.
- SourcingBuy shucked oysters from a fishmonger who can tell you the harvest date, and keep them cold until they go into the pot. They are being cooked only briefly, so their condition going in matters.
Oyster salad belongs to the period when oysters were still cheap, abundant American food rather than a luxury — East Coast beds supplied them by the barrel, and late nineteenth-century cookbooks carry oysters fried, scalloped, pickled, stewed, in patties, in soups and, as here, cold under mayonnaise. Cold dishes bound with mayonnaise reflect a newer fashion, spreading through American home cooking in the last quarter of the 1800s; the arrival of reliable ice and, later, commercial refrigeration is often said to have helped along the chilled composed salad, though the connection is less firmly established than it is usually stated. The layering with lettuce and celery is characteristic — celery was itself something of a status vegetable in this era, often served raw in a tall glass on the table, and it appears alongside oysters in menus of the 1890s and 1900s.