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Oysters Roasted
Select large oysters in the shell, and put them with the rounded side down upon a gridiron over a sharp fire. They will roast in a few minutes. Serve in the shell, with coffee, bread, butter, and pickled cauliflower. OYSTERS SAUTÉ.
Take as many oysters as you desire using; chop fine; to each dozen add one tablespoonful of butter, two of fine cracker dust, salt and pepper to taste; let them be well drained; season and roll in the dust. Have the butter very hot, filling the bottom of the frying pan; fry the oysters a pretty brown, but do not let them burn. Serve on hot toast.
Two short methods sharing one page: whole oysters roasted in the shell over live fire, and a chopped-oyster fry that behaves more like a small croquette than anything you would call sauté today.
- Rounded side downThis is the hinge of the roasted version. The deep half of the shell holds the liquor; turn it the other way and the juices run into the coals and the oyster steams dry. Set them cup-down on the grate and leave them alone.
- A sharp fireDirect heat from hardwood coals or a charcoal grill run hot, not a gas burner. On a modern grill, lid down, large oysters gape in three to five minutes; small ones sooner.
- Judging donenessThe shell popping open is the signal. Pull them the moment the top shell lifts and the edges of the oyster ruffle. Oysters held on the fire past that point tighten into rubber, and the book gives no warning about it.
- GridironA flat iron grate set over the fire. Any grill grate does the job; a perforated pan works if you dislike losing shells through the bars.
- Shucking after roastingRoasted oysters still need a knife to cut the muscle from the top shell, and the shells stay dangerously hot. Work with a folded towel and a short sturdy blade.
- Cracker dustFinely crushed dry soda or water crackers, closer to fine breadcrumbs than to cracker meal from a box. Pulse plain unsalted crackers to a powder.
- "Roll in the dust"Chopped oysters cannot literally be rolled in anything, and the line may be garbled from a whole-oyster method. The workable reading is to mix the chopped meat, butter, crumbs and seasoning, then form small flat cakes and coat them; the mixture must be well drained first or it will not hold.
- Butter that fills the panThat is shallow frying in butter, which browns and burns fast at the temperature this needs. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, gives you the "pretty brown" without the black flecks.
- YieldNeither recipe states a quantity. Reckon six to eight large oysters per person roasted, and a dozen chopped oysters as one generous serving on toast.
The oyster roast belongs to a period when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury: American beds along the Chesapeake and the Gulf were producing enormous volumes through the second half of the nineteenth century, and shell-roasting over coals is often said to have been a common way to eat them in quantity outdoors and at church and club suppers. The odd-looking serving suggestion here — coffee, bread and butter, pickled cauliflower — suggests, though it does not prove, that this was a breakfast or an informal supper dish rather than a course at a formal dinner. The second recipe reflects the same economy from the other direction, stretching a dozen oysters with cracker crumbs and butter, a habit that runs through nineteenth-century American cookery wherever an expensive ingredient met a large table.