The Big Oyster (27 page)

Charles Ranhofer, the Alsatian who was chef at Delmonico's from 1862 until 1894, knew his audiences. In a banquet for a Frenchman, he would serve only raw oysters, for which he gave the following instructions on how to bring the oysters to the table with the hearts still beating:

Open the oysters carefully by inserting the blade of the knife between the shells and prying them open so as to avoid breaking and leave them in their deep shells with the liquor. Serve six or eight according to their size with a quarter of a lemon for each guest. Crackers or slices of very thin bread and butter can be served at the same time. The clams are to be treated exactly the same. A hot sauce or a shallot sauce made with finely chopped shallots mixed with salt, pepper and vinegar, or else a pimentade sauce can be eaten with the oysters. They should only be opened when ready to serve and sent to the table on finely broken ice.

   
Pimentade Sauce

Cut up into quarter inch squares a quarter of a pound of lean veal and two ounces of onions, a quarter pound of raw, lean ham, then add a small clove of crushed garlic, put all these into a saucepan with some butter and let cook slowly. Fry some sweet Spanish peppers in oil after removing the skins; also some green peppers having both finely chopped, add these to the ham, veal and onions and then add a little good gravy and espagnole sauce, also a little tomato purée. Boil all together, season properly, skim off the fat and serve.

But for the non-French, there was a traditional New York appetizer, pickled oysters, but with a new French name,
huîtres marinées,
which he served to the officers of the Russian fleet in 1863:

Blanch some large oysters, drain them after the first boil and keep the liquor; boil some vinegar with cloves, whole pepper, whole allspice, half an ounce of each for every quart of vinegar, and add a little mace; put two-thirds of the oyster liquor with one-third of the vinegar, and also the oysters into hermetically closed glass bottles, and keep them in a cool place. Serve on side dishes with sliced lemon and sprigs of parsley set around.

He also offered Americans a long list of cooked oyster dishes including oysters with curry, oysters on skewers, fried oysters à la Horly, oysters fried with butter or lard. The other oyster dish served in 1863 at the ball for the Russian fleet was oysters à la poulette, which New Yorkers used to call oyster fricassee:

Reduce some velouté sauce with oyster liquor, season with with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and thicken with egg yolks diluted in a little cream, incorporate into it a piece of fresh butter, some strained lemon juice and chopped parsley.

Ranhofer, the most influential New York chef of the second half of the nineteenth century, was a practitioner of French classical cuisine, the cooking of Europe's top hotels at the time, the cuisine defined by Auguste Escoffier. Typical of this cuisine, Ranhofer's recipes are almost always more complicated than they seem. Just to follow his directions for raw oysters on the half shell, the cook needs to know how to make pimentade sauce, and to make pimentade sauce, the recipe for sauce espagnol, the standard brown sauce made from thickening stock, must be known, and in turn the cook needs to know how to make a good stock. To make the fricassee, the cook must know how to make a velouté, and for this, too, a knowledge of the making of stocks is required. The cook also has to know the right temperature, low, to thicken with egg yolks, and how to finish a sauce with a piece of butter—also stirred at a low temperature. The above fricassee is also just a sauce to pour over poached oysters. Ranhofer's instructions for poaching oysters:

Set a saucepan on the hot fire, and place the oysters in it with their own liquor, being careful to stir them about at times to prevent them adhering to the bottom; when firm to the touch, drain them from their liquor.

But occasionally he offered a simple dish such as his Philadelphia-style oysters, which of course, he and fashionable New Yorkers called
huîtres à la Philadelphie:

Put two ounces of butter into a pan, and let it cook until nut brown, then add to it twenty oysters well drained and wiped: fry them until they assume a light color on both sides, then pour in a quarter of a pint of oyster liquor, salt, and pepper. Serve at the same time thin slices of toasted bread, or else pour the oysters over slices of toast laid in a deep dish.

This was one of Ranhofer's secrets. New Yorkers knew they could go to Delmonico's and get some basic New York dishes like the fried oysters served in the markets, even if it was ascribed to some distant place called Philadelphie. In 1893, Ranhofer published
The Epicurean,
his twelve-hundred-page, four-thousand recipe “Franco-American Culinary Encyclopedia,” which, though it made its way into few household kitchens, became a bible for American restaurants and hotels. Though it has thirty oyster recipes, its oyster section states that an oyster is “sexless,” which is incorrect, and that it cannot live out of water, which it can for a considerable number of weeks if kept cool, which is how fresh New York oysters were able to reach faraway places. Showing his French roots, Ranhofer ventured the opinion that cooked oysters, which composed the majority of his oyster recipes, were not as digestible as raw ones. The following is one of his more impressive recipes for a lightly cooked oyster appetizer that could be served instead of raw oysters on the half shell.

   
Oysters Tartare (
huîtres tartare
)

Blanch some large oysters, drain them, well, and season with salt, pepper, fine herbs, shallots cut into very small dice, and blanched capers, minced pickled cucumbers and lobster coral chopped up very fine. Have some thin slices of bread cut oval shaped the size of an oyster, fry in butter, place one oyster on each and cover every one of these with the chopped garnishing, finish by covering all with a mayonnaise jelly.

   
Mayonnaise Sauce Jellied

Use an ordinary Mayonnaise with oil, pouring into it slowly some cold liquid jelly. A jellied mayonnaise may also be prepared by whipping the jelly on ice and incorporating into it at the same time some oil and vinegar, exactly the same as for the egg mayonnaise.

Ranhofer also invented baked Alaska to honor the U.S. purchase of that territory. There were several other Delmonico's dishes that became American classics such as Delmonico potatoes and Delmonico steaks. People would bring ideas to the restaurant. In 1895, after Ranhofer retired, Richard Harding Davis, the journalist who did much to romanticize the image of foreign correspondents, fresh from Latin America, introduced Delmonico's to the avocado. The fruit was one of Davis's few verifiable facts from Latin America. Three years later he would popularize the Spanish-American War and by then Delmonico's had popularized the avocado in New York.

Ben Wenberg, a fruit merchant who traded in the Caribbean and a Delmonico's regular, in 1876 showed Charles Delmonico a new lobster dish that he demonstrated in a chafing dish. Delmonico called it lobster à la Wenberg. But soon the two had an irreparable disagreement and Delmonico refused to use his name. In a fit of intentional dyslexsia, Delmonico inverted Wen-berg to New-berg. Ranhofer established the dish and it became known all over America as lobster Newberg.

Lobster Newberg became an instant classic with many spin-offs, including the inevitable oyster Newberg, this one from the 1894 book
Fifteen New Ways for Oysters
by Sarah Tyson Rorer, a food writer and magazine editor who was one of the founders of the
Ladies' Home Journal.
Notice the quantity of oysters:

Drain fifty oysters; pour over them a pitcher of cold water. Have ready a granite pan, smoking hot; throw in the oysters; add two ounces of butter, a teaspoonful of pepper. Stir carefully with a wooden spoon until the oysters are smoking hot. Have ready the yolks of two eggs beaten with six tablespoons of cream; add quickly—do not boil; then add a tablespoonful of sherry and serve on nicely browned toast.

The oyster craze
had also taken London and Paris. Happily for the American oyster business, European beds were becoming exhausted. By the midnineteenth century, the increased popularity of oysters had led to the stripping of natural beds around the world that had until then been thought to be inexhaustible. In 1861, oyster merchants in the Zeeland region of the Netherlands had handled three million oysters, one million gathered by Zeelanders and the rest by Scots and Englishmen whose native beds had already become distressed. By 1864, the same dealers got only fifty thousand oysters to trade. The same decline was also occurring in France. It had also happened in New York, but by the second half of the century, New Yorkers had become skilled cultivators.

Like New Yorkers, the late-nineteenth-century French were consuming oysters at a staggering rate, perhaps more staggering because they were almost all being eaten raw. It was said that oysters were served four times a day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper. But recipes for cooking oysters were long held to be a gastronomic atrocity in France, whereas in New York only one in three retail oysters was sold in the shell. Most of the others were stewed, stuffed, fried, roasted, put in soups or sauces, or in some way cooked.

The French had long been oyster fanatics. Not only was there the legend of Napoléon's prebattle oysters, but Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire are all believed to have eaten a few dozen oysters when in search of inspiration. And having won France's greatest battles and launched its most original ideas, oysters, it is not surprising to learn, had also fueled its revolution. Danton and Robespierre found that whenever the revolutionary spirit began to wane, several dozen on the half shell would spur them on again. Some would say they ate too many oysters. It is not certain which, if any of these often-repeated legends are true, but sometimes as much can be learned about a people from their myths as from the verifiable facts.

In the seventeenth century, the French regulated the mussel industry but not oysters, believing in their unconquerable fertility. But unlike the British, by the early eighteenth century they could see their mistake and began regulating natural beds. In the nineteenth century, faced with disease, flukes of nature, bad luck, and overfishing, they realized regulations were not enough, and they began developing cultivation.