Batter
1/8 teaspoon pepper. 2 eggs. 3/4 cup milk.
PROCESS: Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk slowly, beating constantly until batter is smooth. Beat eggs thick and light, cut and fold them into batter. Beat thoroughly and dip the drained and dried oysters into batter, one by one, and fry in deep, hot Cottolene.
This is a fritter batter for deep-fried oysters, printed here with its ingredient list clipped mid-way — the flour, salt and any leavening that would have headed the list are missing. What follows covers the gaps and the frying.
- The missing dry ingredientsOnly the pepper survives from the top of the list. A batter of this type in this period would run to about 1 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and often 1 teaspoon baking powder for 3/4 cup milk and 2 eggs, but that is inference, not what the book says. Work from a current fritter batter rather than guessing at the original proportions.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company and long discontinued. Any neutral high-smoke-point frying fat stands in for it.
- Fat temperatureThe book says only "deep, hot" and gives no test. Cookbooks of the period commonly judged deep fat by a bread cube browning in roughly forty seconds to a minute, which corresponds to somewhere around 350-375F. Cooler than that and the batter drinks fat; much hotter and the coating colours before the oyster has heated through.
- Drained and dried is the hingeThe instruction to drain and dry each oyster is doing real work. Oyster liquor on the surface thins the batter where it touches and the coating slides off in the fat. Blot them on a towel and batter them one at a time, as directed.
- Folding the eggsThe eggs are beaten separately and folded in, which lightens the batter — then the recipe says to beat it thoroughly again, which undoes some of that. Fold and stop; a light hand gives a crisper shell.
- Frying timeTwo to three minutes, until the coating is set and golden. Oysters need only to be heated through; longer and they tighten into rubber inside the crust.
- YieldWith the flour quantity missing from the printed list, the yield cannot be worked out from the book; a batter of the size guessed at in point [0] would coat something on the order of a pint of shucked oysters. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop out of temperature.
52 Sunday Dinners was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the makers of Cottolene, which is why that brand name appears in the frying instruction rather than the lard or drippings a cook might otherwise have used. Cottolene was among the earliest widely marketed cottonseed-oil shortenings, and promotional cookbooks of this kind were one of the ways manufacturers encouraged American households to move away from animal fat around the turn of the century. As for oysters in winter: the old rule about months with an R is usually explained by the spawning season and by the difficulty of keeping shellfish through a summer without refrigeration, and cold weather was when barrelled oysters travelled inland in quantity.