Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Fried Oysters
Fried Oysters
Wash, drain, and dry oysters between 2 towels; let stand in a marinade 10 or more minutes, then drain again. Roll in cracker-crumbs, seasoned with salt, pepper, and paprika. For 2 cups oysters, beat 2 eggs with 2 tablespoons cold water until well mixed; dip oysters, crumbed, into egg, and roll again in crumbs.
Fry 1 minute in hot Crisco. Use frying-basket and cook 6 oysters at a time. Drain and serve at once with tartare sauce.
The marinade is made as follows: Take 1 part melted Crisco and 3 of vinegar, with salt and pepper to taste. Stir oysters into this and let stand 10 minutes, then drain off any of the marinade that has not been absorbed.
A straightforward breaded-and-fried oyster, written when Crisco was new enough to be named in every line. The only real trick is heat management.
- Oil temperatureThe book says only "hot Crisco" and gives no figure; modern deep-frying practice for a crumb coat like this is around 370-375F. Below that the crumb coat drinks fat and the oyster steams; much above it and the crust browns before the oyster heats through. One minute suits that range and no longer — oysters overcooked shrink and turn tough.
- Six at a timeFrying only six at a time keeps the fat from dropping in temperature, and the practice still holds. Let the fat recover between baskets.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, launched in 1911; the modern product is reformulated but works the same way. Any neutral frying oil or shortening with a high smoke point does the job.
- The marinadeOne part melted fat to three of vinegar is a sharp, thin dressing rather than anything that will tenderize. Ten minutes is plenty, and draining well matters — wet oysters shed their crumbs in the fat.
- QuantityTwo cups of shucked oysters is a pint, roughly 16-24 oysters depending on size, serving two to four as a course. Buy them shucked in their liquor and drain that off.
- DryingThe two-towel drying at the start is the hinge of the whole thing. Surface moisture is what makes breading slip and fat spatter; press gently, do not squeeze.
- Cracker-crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs mean plain soda or water crackers crushed fine — closest modern equivalent is unsalted saltines pulsed in a processor. They give a lighter, sandier crust than dry breadcrumbs and brown faster, so watch the color.
- DrainingDrain on a rack rather than on paper, or the underside softens in the minute before serving.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really advertising: written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, which came on the market in 1911 and needed a use-case. That is why the shortening is named in the marinade and in the frying, with no mention of butter or lard. Fried oysters themselves were far older and far commoner than they now seem — Atlantic and Gulf oysters were cheap bulk protein through the nineteenth century, sold shucked by the quart from barrels and carts, and American cookbooks of the era commonly have them fried, scalloped, stewed and in patties.