Oysters Expansio, Not Rockefeller : Oysters Expansio, Not Rockefeller

In early October, we were in the Northeast to see old friends and to drink in the autumn foliage of New York and New England. One evening, we stopped for a late supper at a restaurant in Westport, Conn., and, my appetite being minimal at the time, I decided I wanted only an appetizer. I hadn’t had oysters Rockefeller in many years--in fact, hadn’t seen them on a menu since I moved here from New York almost 30 years ago. That’s not to say that oysters Rockefeller don’t appear on menus in Los Angeles, only that I probably don’t frequent the right places.

The memories brought back by those two words set my little salivary ducts to doing an impression of the fountains at Versailles. If you’ve never experienced oysters Rockefeller, they’re oysters on the half-shell topped with a mixture of chopped spinach, bacon, onion, shallots, Tabasco or cayenne, and a little anisette, placed on a bed of rock salt and baked till the mixture bubbles. That’s a simplification, of course. There are other ingredients in there that vary from chef to chef; but that’s basically it. Even now, my mouth is doing a positively disgusting water ballet.

Needless to say, I ordered the oysters Rockefeller.

When they arrived, my spirits were dashed, my evening ruined. The hash-slinger who had prepared them had used no bed of rock salt (which is used principally to keep the half-shells steady in their journey through the oven doors, the swinging doors from kitchen to dining room, and thence to table), and, instead of topping the oysters with that spinach-based mixture, he appeared to have dumped said mixture over the whole plate, obscuring the oysters and their shells entirely.

A phrase popped into my mind: expansio ad absurdum . Obviously, that’s Latin. Equally obviously, I suppose, it isn’t Latin. I don’t think expansio is a legitimate word in any language. I studied Latin for three years in high school, and I’m glad I did, even though I don’t remember much beyond omnia Gallia est divisa and amo, amas, amat . From college philosophy, I remember reductio ad absurdum , which is a method of either refuting or proving a proposition by positing a situation in which its application, or the application of its alternatives, would lead to an absurd conclusion.

From reductio ad absurdum came expansio ad absurdum , which is a method of preparing anything in which whatever is prepared is destroyed by the maxim, “If one is good, then two, three, four, or more ad infinitum is better”.

Many a dish of snails has been ruined by “expansio ad absurdum. “ Let’s face it, nobody likes snails. Lots of people love shallots and garlic, though, served in a little butter with nutmeg. Since it would be coarse to serve a bowl of garlic-and-shallot-butter to a gourmet, the clever French threw in a little protein in the form of snails tucked into their pretty shells, and they placed the delicately spiced butter in the shells as the real treasure. They even refrained from calling them snails. Snails are known mostly for leaving a trail of slime on your patio, so the French call them escargots, which sounds pretty good.

But what a lot of hash-slingers do, even in some of the best restaurants on both coasts and, I assume it’s safe to say, points in between, is to apply the “expansio ad absurdum” principle. People like butter more than they like escargots, so the chances are that when you order escargots, you’ll get what looks like a birdbath of butter with snail shells sitting forlornly in the pool.

A confession: My main purpose in writing this is to try to elicit a response from a Latin scholar. I like the notion of “expansio ad absurdum, “ but, as a believer in and supporter of linguistic accuracy, I’d welcome a better word than expansio, if there is one, and I feel sure there must be.