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Fried Oysters
Select good-sized oysters, wash them carefully, and dust with salt and pepper. Roll them in fine dry bread crumbs, then in slightly-beaten egg, diluted with a fourth cupful of water, to each egg. Roll in crumbs again and fry in deep, hot Snowdrift, which will brown a bit of bread in a minute. Drain on crumpled paper and serve with Chili Sauce, Tomato Sauce, Plain Hollandaise Sauce, or Horseradish, or Russian Hollandaise Sauce. If a savory flavor is especially desired, the oysters may be sprinkled with a few drops of Worcestershire Sauce before they are egged and crumbed.
A straightforward deep-fry that depends almost entirely on two things: dry oysters and fat at the right temperature. The recipe's own doneness test is more reliable than most period instructions.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the reason this book exists. Any neutral frying fat works: vegetable shortening, peanut oil, or canola.
- The bread test, in numbersFat that browns a cube of bread in one minute is roughly 365-375F. Below that the coating soaks; above it the crumbs darken before the oyster heats through.
- Dry the oysters firstThis is the hinge. Shucked oysters carry liquor, and wet oysters shed their crust in the fat. Drain them, blot them on a towel, then season and crumb.
- Egg washA fourth cupful of water per egg is a quarter cup, thinner than a modern egg wash.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe double crumbing is not a flourish; the first coat gives the egg something dry to grip. Let the breaded oysters rest 10 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Frying timeTwo to three minutes, until the crust is deep gold; longer and the oysters tighten into rubber inside an otherwise perfect crust.
- DrainingCrumpled paper means brown paper or newsprint of the era. Use paper towels, or better, a rack over a sheet pan so the underside stays crisp.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A pint of shucked oysters serves three or four as a first course.
Fried oysters belong to the decades when oysters were cheap urban food rather than a luxury — the Chesapeake and Gulf beds supplied barrels of them by rail, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry them fried, scalloped, panned, stewed and in patties. The long list of sauces here is characteristic of the period's fondness for the French sauce repertoire filtered through the American household kitchen, with Worcestershire and chili sauce standing in for anything more elaborate. The book itself is a promotional cookbook: Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening, and cottonseed oil, a by-product of the Southern cotton industry, was heavily marketed from the 1890s onward as a clean, cheap alternative to lard for exactly this kind of deep frying.