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Fried Oysters (Drain the oysters and cover)
Drain the oysters, and cover well with very fine cracker crumbs; season with salt and pepper. Let the oysters stand half an hour, dip, and roll again in the meal; fry brown in plenty of lard and butter. Do not let them stand, but serve hot.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century frying method that assumes you know your fat is hot and your oysters are fresh. The whole thing hinges on the half-hour rest, which lets the crumbs hydrate and set into a coating that will not slide off in the pan.
- Drain them properlyTip the oysters into a sieve and let them sit several minutes, then blot on a towel. Surface liquor is what makes crumb coating turn to paste and spit in the fat.
- "Meal" here means the crumbsThe recipe starts with cracker crumbs and then says to roll again "in the meal" — it is the same fine cracker crumb mixture, not cornmeal. Soda crackers or saltines crushed fine, about 1 cup for a pint of oysters.
- The dip is unstated"Dip, and roll again" almost certainly means dip in beaten egg, sometimes thinned with a spoonful of milk or water, before the second crumbing. Without it the second coat has nothing to hold to.
- Lard and butterHalf and half works, but butter alone will brown and burn before the oysters are done. A neutral oil with a spoonful of butter for flavour behaves the same way and is easier to hold steady.
- Fat depth and heatThe recipe only says "plenty of lard and butter" and gives no temperature. Modern practice for shallow-frying oysters is roughly half an inch of fat at about 375F: much cooler and the crumbs soak, much hotter and they darken before the oyster is hot through.
- Two minutes, not moreDo not overcook -- Large oysters need roughly 1 to 1½ minutes per side; they are done when the crumbs are deep gold and the edges have ruffled. Longer and they tighten and toughen.
- Do not crowd, do not stackFry in batches of six or eight so the fat temperature holds, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp. The instruction not to let them stand is the important one; they lose their crust within minutes.
- YieldA pint of shucked oysters, 20 to 25 depending on size, serves three or four as a course.
Fried oysters belong to the era when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury: American beds from the Chesapeake to Long Island Sound were producing at industrial scale through the second half of the nineteenth century, and rail shipment in barrels and cans put them on inland tables far from any coast. That abundance is why household books of this period give oysters a section of their own, with fried, scalloped, stewed, panned and pickled versions crowding one another. The cracker crumb coating is a distinctly American touch: crackers were an early packaged staple, and crushed crackers stood in for breadcrumbs in everything from oyster fries to puddings. Overfishing, pollution and disease depleted those beds in a staggered way over the following decades, which is often said to be part of why a dish once treated as everyday reads today as a restaurant order.