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Fried Oysters (Pick large select oysters)
Pick large select oysters; remove all the pieces of shell; drain in a colander. Roll the crackers fine; season with white pepper and salt; dip the oysters well in rolled cracker; lay them on platters. Have your griddle hot, and fry a golden color in boiling lard and butter mixed.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know how to shallow-fry, so most of the work is in reading between the lines. The hinge is dryness: oysters that go into the fat wet will shed their coating and spatter.
- "Select" is a size gradeShucked oyster grades ran, in descending size, counts, extra selects, selects, standards, though the exact counts varied by region and dealer. A pint of selects is roughly two to three servings as a main course. Ask for shucked oysters in their liquor rather than the small standards sold for stews.
- Drain, then dryDraining in a colander is not enough for a crumb coating. Spread the oysters on a towel and blot the tops as well, or the cracker meal turns to paste and slides off in the fat.
- The crackersThis means plain soda or water crackers, crushed to a coarse meal rather than a powder. Saltines work; reduce or omit the added salt, since they are already salted. About one cup of crumbs coats a pint of oysters.
- White pepper for a reasonWhite pepper -- The usual explanation is appearance: no black specks on a pale, golden crust. Black pepper tastes the same here and looks rustic; either is fine.
- An egg wash helpsThe recipe dips straight into crumbs, which gives a thin, patchy coat. A dip in beaten egg between two passes of cracker meal is standard now and holds far better on a wet shellfish.
- "Griddle" means the panA flat cast-iron griddle or heavy skillet with fat perhaps a quarter inch deep. Half lard and half butter gives flavor from the butter and a higher smoke point from the lard; the butter will still brown, so keep the heat near 360-375F and skim if solids darken.
- Time them shortNinety seconds to two minutes a side is enough. An oyster is done as soon as the crumb is golden and the edges ruffle; past three minutes the muscle tightens and goes rubbery, whatever the crust looks like.
- ServingDrain on a rack rather than stacking on paper, and send them out immediately with lemon, or with a cold tartar or chili sauce.
Fried oysters in cracker crumbs are an American habit rather than an English one, and they belong to the decades when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury. Chesapeake and Long Island Sound beds, plus rail cars packed with ice, put shucked oysters in inland kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why turn-of-the-century household cookbooks give them a chapter of their own and why so many recipes assume you have a pint on hand. The cracker coating reflects what was actually in the pantry: the ubiquitous soda or water cracker, rolled fine with a bottle or a rolling pin, served the same purpose in croquettes, scalloped dishes and stuffings. Chesapeake harvests peaked in the 1880s and were already falling through the 1890s as overfishing and pollution shrank those beds, and the shift of the oyster from everyday food to something ordered by the half-dozen is one of the clearest changes between a book like this and a modern one.