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Oyster Fritters (Select nice oysters wipe them)
Select nice oysters, wipe them dry, have ready a batter made of five eggs, five tablespoonfuls of flour, and milk enough to make a pretty stiff batter. Beat until very smooth, put in a pan equal quantities of butter and lard. As soon as it begins to froth well, put a large spoonful of batter in the pan, laying a large oyster in the middle of it. If the batter is too thin, add flour, if too thick more milk can be used. Very fine.
A shallow-fried batter cake with a single oyster set in its middle, rather than the chopped-oyster fritters more common today. The batter is loose enough that quantities need adjusting as you go, which the original acknowledges.
- The hinge: cook fast and brieflyAn oyster wants about two minutes of heat. Once the batter is golden on both sides the oyster is done; longer frying to "be sure" turns it rubbery and weeping.
- Batter consistencyFive eggs to five tablespoons of flour is egg-heavy, closer to a thick pancake batter than a coating. Add milk a spoonful at a time; it should mound on the spoon and spread slowly in the pan, not run.
- FatEqual butter and lard, enough to film the pan generously. Butter alone will brown and burn before the fritter sets. Clarified butter with a neutral high-heat oil works the same way if lard is not to hand.
- "Begins to froth well"That is the water in the butter boiling off. If the fat is smoking it is too hot and the outside will colour before the centre cooks.
- Drying the oystersWiping them dry is not fussiness. Surface liquor makes the batter slide off and spits in the fat.
- YieldAs written this makes roughly a dozen to fifteen fritters, depending on spoon size. Fry in batches and hold on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp.
- Oyster sizeThe recipe wants one whole shucked oyster per fritter, large enough to sit in the middle of the batter. Very large ones will not cook through in the time the batter takes; halve them or use two smaller ones.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt and pepper the batter, and serve with lemon or a vinegar-based sauce.
Oyster fritters belong to the era when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury, and American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried them in quantity alongside oyster pie, oyster loaf, scalloped oysters and oyster soup. Eastern seaboard beds were still yielding enormous harvests, and shucked oysters travelled inland by rail in cans and barrels, which is why books printed far from the coast treat them as an everyday ingredient. The batter-and-single-oyster construction here is halfway between a fritter and a small pancake, and the vague quantities are typical of the period: the cook was expected to judge the batter by eye and correct it in the pan, exactly as the recipe instructs.