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Raw Oysters with Chantilly Sauce
Mix in a bowl one tablespoonful very finely chopped shallots, one teaspoonful of salt, half teaspoonful of pepper, half tablespoonful finely chopped chives, one tablespoonful olive oil, half tablespoonful tarragon vinegar, four tablespoonfuls white vinegar, and half teaspoonful pepper sauce. Serve the oysters on the half shell, pour a little of the sauce over each, or serve in a sauce bowl with the oysters.
This is a mignonette-style vinegar dressing for oysters on the half shell, and it needs almost no translation — only a few points of proportion, terminology and sourcing.
- "Pepper sauce"In American books of this era the term meant a thin cayenne-and-vinegar sauce of the Tabasco type, or a homemade vinegar steeped with hot peppers — not a chili paste or sriracha. Half a teaspoon of a thin Louisiana-style hot sauce is the closest modern stand-in.
- The salt is highA teaspoon of salt in roughly five tablespoons of liquid is aggressive, and oyster liquor is already saline. Start with ¼ teaspoon, taste the sauce against one oyster, and build from there.
- Let it standRaw shallot in straight vinegar tastes harsh at first and mellows if the sauce is allowed to sit; mixing it before you open the oysters rather than after will do no harm.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a bruised sprig of tarragon in white wine vinegar for a few days. If you substitute plain vinegar, add a pinch of chopped fresh tarragon so the anise note is not lost.
- Vinegar strength"White vinegar" in a book of this period may have meant a white wine vinegar rather than the distilled vinegar sold today. White wine or champagne vinegar gives a rounder result; distilled vinegar alone will taste flatter and sharper.
- QuantityThe yield is about 6 tablespoons of sauce, which dresses two to three dozen oysters at roughly half a teaspoon each. It does not keep well once the shallots have gone soft — make it the day you serve it.
- Raw oysters and who should skip themServe only live oysters from a reputable source, shucked to order, kept on ice, with shells that close when tapped. Vinegar and hot sauce do not neutralize Vibrio bacteria, so anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease should not eat them raw.
The name is a small puzzle: "Chantilly" in French kitchen usage almost always means sweetened whipped cream, or a sauce enriched with it, and this is nothing of the kind — it is a vinegar-and-shallot dressing, what a French cook would call a mignonette and what an oyster bar today would call mignonette sauce. American cookbooks borrowed French names freely and not always accurately, partly to signal refinement to readers who had never seen a French menu; the fashion for such labels is generally traced to the influence of Delmonico's and its imitators. What the recipe does capture is the American oyster boom at its height: harvests from Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound were enormous and cheap, and ice and rail put half-shell oysters on inland tables.