The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  New York had become a commercial center connecting the new American West and the old Europe. In 1830, the port of New York had handled 37 percent of the United States’ foreign trade. In 1870, it was handling 57 percent.

  Travelers who visited New York before and after the war were amazed by the difference. British journalist George Augustus Sala, who had been a harsh critic on his 1863 visit—also a Confederate sympathizer—returned, and in America Revisited, published in 1883, he wrote, “Manhattan is, at the present moment, perhaps with one exception, as enjoyable a metropolis as could be found in the whole world over.” The one exception was that he did not like the way, after it snowed, the streets became mired with sloppy, dirty slush. This problem remains unsolved.

  Dickens also noted the change when he returned in 1867–68. He said he felt as though he “might be living in Paris,” staying at the Westminster on Irving Place with its French staff. “The number of grand houses and splendid equipages is quite surprising,” he wrote. Only in his fifties, the venerated author was in poor health and seemed elderly. He had been receiving offers to perform readings of his work in the United States since the end of the war and now had arranged a tour from which he was hoping to earn a considerable sum in ticket sales. He was an even bigger star than he had been on his first trip and was thought to be a brilliant reader. In New York, more than five thousand waited in line for hours to buy tickets and a man was arrested with thousands of forged tickets. Performances were sold out, with standing room let in at the last moment. But there were still bruised feelings from some who had attended the Boz Ball. George Templeton Strong wrote:

  Charles Dickens’ first Reading last night at Steinway Hall is said to have been admirable. It doubtless was so, but I am in no fever to hear him. I remember the American Notes and the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit, which were his return for the extravagant honors paid him on his first avatar twenty-five years ago. I also remember that both books, especially the former, were filled with abuse and sarcasm against the slaveholding republic, and that during our four years of death-struggle with slavery, Mr. Dickens never uttered one word of sympathy with us or our national cause, though one such word from the most popular living writer of prose fiction, would have been so welcome, and though it would have come so fitly from a professional “humanitarian.” I fear Mr. Dickens is a snob of genius, and that some considerable percentage of his fine feeling for the wrongs and sorrows of humanity is histrionic, but perhaps I do him injustice. Anyhow, I should like to hear him read the Christmas Carol: Scrooge, and Marley’s Ghost, and Bob Cratchit.

  Dickens was alone—he had separated from his wife and left her back in England with her suet dumplings, and, aware of the hostile feelings in the American press, did not want to show his new mistress. When not performing, he kept to his quiet French hotel and dined by himself at Delmonico’s, eating and drinking well, according to the waiters. It was a kind of elegant New York existence that would not have been possible twenty-five years earlier in the rough little town of oyster cellars and dance halls.

  Dickens being introduced at the banquet.

  FROM AN 1868 PERIODICAL

  Dickens spent four months in the United States and gave seventy readings, earning himself almost £20,000, considerably less than American scalpers made off his readings. This just added to his bitterness about a country whose failure to conform to copyright law had already denied him a considerable income. Yet before he left, New York just had to throw him another banquet. This time it was given by the New York press at Delmonico’s, as were all grand occasions at the time in New York. The banquet cost $3,000, overtaking the Boz Ball and the City Hotel dinner but considerably less than the 1871 bill for a Delmonico’s dinner to celebrate politician William “Boss” Tweed’s daughter’s wedding for $13,000. At the Dickens affair, tickets were sold for $15. Horace Greeley hosted the proceedings and the guests included many of America’s notable journalists from Boston to Chicago. It was intended to be a dinner for 175, but 204 diners managed to get tickets.

  Dickens arrived an hour late, limping in with the help of a cane. The New York Herald commented that the menu offered “oysters on the half shell, sure, but these were the only things that were not dignified with some literary name.” There was “crème d’asperges à la Dumas,” “agneau farci à la Walter Scott,” and “côtelettes de grouse à la Fenimore Cooper.” Those platters of oysters at the start were the only touch of the old New York and even they were labeled in French. The entire menu was in French—correct French—and the seventy-three dishes that had been served at the City Hotel had been cut to about half that number.

  Women were not invited to the Dickens dinner. Even influential women writers were denied tickets despite the committee having invited members of the New York working press. When Jane (Jennie) Cunningham Croly, a fashion and theater critic for the New York World, applied for a ticket, the New York Press Club simply laughed, despite the fact that her husband, David Croly, managing editor of the World, was chairman of the dinner committee and supported her claim. Laughing at journalists always comes with risks, and Jennie Croly angrily reported this rebuke to other prominent women journalists, who in turn also applied for tickets, including Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in New York. Fern was a pseudonym for Sara Willis Parton, the wife of James Parton, another member of the committee. But Croly and Parton found that they were powerless to help their wives. The women retaliated by forming their own club that did not allow men. There was at the time not a single women’s club in New York—not even a garden club or bridge club or church club. The men, who had men-only clubs excluding women for every occasion, continued to laugh.

  While men were planning the Dickens dinner, women were planning their club, which they named Sorosis, a botanical term meaning “agglomeration.” This, in fact, was one of the first women’s clubs in the United States and it met twice a month in a private room at Delmonico’s, which gave the restaurant a progressive reputation at a time when women were not allowed to dine without men in public. Sorosis discussed issues of the day, championed women’s issues, including pressuring Columbia University to admit women, and entertained distinguished visiting women such as Louisa May Alcott. Despite relentless gibes by men, the club became a famous fixture of Delmonico’s and once a year Delmonico’s hosted the Sorosis banquet, to which men were invited. The women would perplex the men by dressing in stunning gowns and leaving them to wonder why such beautiful women would act in such unfeminine ways.

  But even Delmonico’s did not allow unescorted women in their public dining rooms. A woman by herself, like the women in the oyster cellars, was considered of low morals, a prostitute. Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist who arrived in New York in 1889, defied these rules and was often mistaken for a prostitute. Victoria Wood-hull, a socialist who advocated free love and opposed marriage and later ran for president, insisted on being served in Delmonico’s and, when the management refused, went outside and brought in a driver from a horse cab and ordered tomato soup for both of them. In the 1880s, Delmonico’s showed its fashionably progressive credentials by allowing unescorted women to dine during the day up until dinner service.

  The New York of the second half of the nineteenth century was a city overtaken by oystermania. It was usual for a family to have two oyster dinners a week, one of which would be on Sunday. It was one of the few moments in culinary history when a single food, served in more or less the same preparations, was commonplace for all socioeconomic levels. It was the food of Delmonico’s and the food of the dangerous slum. The oyster remained inexpensive. Shucked oysters were sold by street vendors for twenty-five cents a quart. The poor person might eat raw oysters from a street stand or have a stew at the market—it was cheap enough—or a wealthy man might get the same raw oysters to start his meal or the same stew for a fish course at the most expensive restaurants. At Delmonico’s, a serving of six or eight oysters, depending on the size, cost twenty-five cents. Or i
t would not be uncommon for the wealthy man to eat oysters from a street vendor at the Washington Market or in an oyster cellar. The next night he might be attending an extravagant banquet in honor of some notable and be served oysters again.

  Even the New York press indulged in great logic-defying flourishes and hyperbole in their laudatory tributes to oysters. In 1872, in an article on the American oyster boom, Harper’s Weekly magazine made this observation:

  The delicious bivalve was familiar to the ancients . . . . Their indulgence, however, never encouraged tyranny or degenerated into despotism, as did the love of peacock’s tongues; nor were they ever known to share the demoralizing tendencies necessarily incident to the unrestrained consumption of pâté de foie gras.

  The elegant restaurants published cookbooks with oyster recipes. But there was also a movement in the second half of the nineteenth century toward cooking schools and cookbooks for working-class and poor women. There, too, oyster recipes played a prominent role.

  Juliet Corson was born in the Roxbury section of Boston in 1841 and opened the Free Training School for Women at age thirty-three, before she learned how to cook. She hired a French chef, thought to have been the celebrated Pierre Blot. Two years later she was living on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan giving cooking classes in her home. She called her classes the New York Cooking School and had one thousand students a year. In everything Corson did, she addressed her social conscience. The New York Cooking School tried to charge enormous fees to the rich while asking only a nickel a lesson of the middle class. The poor could attend for free. When New York’s economy declined in the 1870s, she self-published controversial pamphlets such as “Fifteen cent dinners for Families of Six” and “How can we live if we are moderately poor.” One of her numerous cookbooks, titled Meals for the Million: The People’s Cookbook, has eight oyster recipes including this one for oyster fritters, a popular inexpensive dish because it could be made with the smallest, lowest-grade shucked oysters.

  The oysters should be examined for bits of shell, and their liquor strained. Then make a batter by mixing two cupfuls of flour, the yelk [sic] of one raw egg, a tablespoonful of salad oil, a dust of cayenne pepper, and sufficient oyster liquor to make a batter just thick enough to sustain the drops from the mixing spoon; plenty of fat should now be heated until it is smoking; the white of the egg should be beaten stiff and gently stirred into the batter when the fat is hot, together with the oysters, either whole or chopped, and it should be put into the hot fat by the large spoonful, and fried brown; the fritters when done should be laid on brown paper for a moment to free them from grease, and then served hot.

  Her numerous books to help people of modest income almost always included recipes for oysters, though not always in the copious quantity suggested in books for the upper classes. For heated oysters in the shell, she suggests only four or five per person. Her 1885 Family Cook Book included these among its ten oyster recipes.

  Cold Half-shell Oysters

  Thoroughly wash 25 oysters, keeping half the shells entire; arrange them on a platter, or on several small dishes, putting into each shell an oyster, together with a dust of cayenne and a squeeze of lemon juice. Serve with salt and brown bread and butter for luncheon or supper. They are frequently served with thin bread before the soup at dinner.

  Hot Half-shell Oysters

  Open the oysters as directed in the recipe “Oysters on the Half-shell;” arrange the deep shells on a baking pan, set them in a very hot oven, or before a hot fire, until they are perfectly hot; then put into each one half a teaspoonful of butter, a dust of cayenne, and a raw oyster; put the pan in the oven for one minute, turn the oyster over once in the butter, and then serve them on the shells at once, putting four or five on a plate before each person. The success of the dish depends on the rapidity with which it is prepared. Brown bread and butter, or crackers, are served with the oyster, either for luncheon or supper.

  Pierre Blot, who probably taught Corson to cook, approached most things American and especially New York with a tourist’s enthusiasm. His 1869 Handbook of Practical Cookery was intended to be a guide to American food and emphasized American products and ways. He paid particular attention to Indian traditions and offered such insights as the Indian custom of bleeding fish before cooking, which, he said, made for whiter flesh. He authenticated his clam-chowder recipe by asserting that it was given to him by a Harlem River boat captain. Reflecting the time and place, Blot’s book included a dozen recipes for oysters. He flatly stated that “The American oyster is unquestionably the best that can be found.” But, as the following recipe for oysters in silver shells indicates, his oyster recipes were not aimed at the poor.

  Put a quart of oysters and their liquor in a saucepan, set it on the fire, take off at the first boil, and drain. Set a saucepan on the fire with two ounces of butter in it; as soon as melted, add a teaspoonful of flour, stir, and, when turning rather brown, add the juice of the oysters, about a gill of gravy, salt and pepper; boil generally for about ten minutes, stirring now and then. While it is boiling, place the oysters on scallop-shells, or on silver shells made for that purpose, two or three oysters on each, turn some of the above sauce on each, after it has boiled; dust with bread-crumbs, put a little piece of butter on each shell, and bake for about twelve minutes in a warm oven.

  A dozen silver shells served thus make a sightly and excellent dish.

  The two most common gastronomic observations made about nineteenth-century New York were that the oysters were cheap and that the people ate enormous quantities not only of oysters but of everything. In 1881, exiled Cuban independence leader José Martí wrote of the newly fashionable Coney Island resort:

  The poor people eat shrimps and oysters on the beach, or pastries, and meats on the free tables provided by some of the hotels for such meals. The wealthy squandered huge sums on purple infusions that pass for wine, and strange, heavy dishes, which our palates, delighted by the artistic and the light, would surely find little to our taste. These people enjoy quantity; we enjoy quality.

  This was not much improvement over the observations of James Fenimore Cooper, who in the 1830s had called Americans “the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known.” Despite such complaints, New York in the 1880s was a far better place to eat than it had been when the century had begun. It was still led by America’s premier restaurant, Delmonico’s, which was ever larger and more grand as it moved along with the fashionable people, uptown. In 1846, 21–25 Broadway became the Delmonico Hotel. In 1855, Delmonico’s opened on the corner of Broadway and Chambers. In 1860, it took over the Grinnell Mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, an enormous house of elegant ballrooms and spacious dining rooms. In 1876, Delmonico’s followed the uptown trend to Twenty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, and in 1897 moved again to Fifth and Forty-fourth Street.

  It was unthinkable for anyone even modestly affluent to visit New York and not dine at Delmonico’s. Anyone of note that the city wanted to celebrate was thrown a Delmonico’s banquet. In 1861, Delmonico’s served a banquet in honor of Samuel T. Morse. From his table he sent the first cablegram to Europe. In forty minutes an answer came back to applause from the 350 guests. After the war, most of the leading generals, including Grant, Sherman, and McClelland, as well as President Johnson, were thrown Delmonico’s banquets. These feasts usually began, in true New York fashion, with an oyster dish. Sometimes, as in the November 5,1863, ball for the commanders of the visiting Russian fleet, the menu would begin with two oyster dishes. A November 1882 buffet for forty in honor of Charles Dana, owner-editor of the New York Sun, started with oysters béchamel—a white sauce invented by a seventeenth-century Frenchman for salt cod—and “huîtres farcies,” stuffed oysters. The select dinner for General Grant and twelve guests in March 1873 began with raw oysters on the half shell, which was listed simply as “huître,” followed by soups, hor d’oeuvres, trout, lamb, duck, fois gras, a few other treats, and desserts, followed by a supper for eighty
that began with “huîtres béchamel aux truffes,” oysters in white sauce with truffles. The menus for these events were sometimes engraved on silver pages or printed on satin or sometimes bound in leather.

  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.