Oyster bloody Chazzy shots

A bloody mary is a fine cocktail. It cleverly and pleasingly blurs the line of being a healthy drink – it’s basically a salad, after all – that’s riddled with booze. It’s an excellent hangover cure and is considered perfectly acceptable as a breakfast accompaniment. Its strong spicy and savoury flavours and somewhat viscous texture mean it’s not to everyone’s taste, but those characteristics are what make me love it. So, if a regular bloody mary is not for the faint-hearted, this version, with its bivalve treat, takes the drink up another notch. 

It was the summer of 1997 and we were living by the beach. I have a distant memory that this was the drink du jour because of an American friend who was lurking around during that period. A bloody mary mix would be made, small glasses would be chilled, oysters shucked and much merriment ensued. In my memory, the drinks appeared so often it felt as though they would become a tradition, but somehow they were largely forgotten until I resurrected them this year at my now closed restaurant.

It started with my manager wanting to put a bloody mary on the menu, which we quickly renamed the bloody Chazzy, a tribute to my mum, who is partial to the regular version of the drink and particularly fond of this shot version. Also, the name seemed appropriate, as a cry of “bloody Chazzy!” has some precedent.

The ingredients are universal, but we did a little adjusting to reflect the flavours we used in the restaurant. In fact, to make this version exactly as it’s given here, you will have to buy my new cookbook and first make the mustard and the fermented chilli sauce. If that is too big a stretch, substitute the mustard in the recipe with half seeded and half hot English, and use Tabasco sauce – but a bit less – instead of the fermented chilli sauce. We also replaced the traditional Worcestershire sauce with fish sauce. If you already have a preferred bloody mary recipe, please feel free to use that and move straight to the shucking of the oysters. While a freshly shucked oyster is ideal, as it ensures extra salty juices, no one will be upset if you use pre-shucked ones.

Apart from getting the balance of flavours right, which is a very personal for this particular drink, the most important thing is the temperature. You want the oysters to be cool but not cold, as this will make the flavour kind of disappear. The tomato mix needs to be ice-cold but with no actual ice particles, as that will mess with the textural experience of the whole affair. A good trick is to make a large batch of the mix and keep it in the freezer – it will ice up like a slushie, and all you need to do is defrost it to the point where it becomes a smooth liquid. And then, with a cry of “bloody Chazzy!”, you can knock back one of these. It’s a shot full of health, with a little extra kick to see you on your way.