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Pickled Oysters for Keeping
Separate the oysters from the liquor, pour boiling water on them, stir them well in it and rinse in cold water; put them in a kettle with barely enough water to cover, mixing with it onehalf tablespoon salt to every hundred oysters; boil up sufficient to plump them, take out and spread on a moulding board, cover with a cloth. To every pint of the oyster liquor, add one quart vinegar, not too strong, one tablespoon salt, one tablespoon whole cloves, one tablespoon whole black pepper, one teaspoon of whole mace. Boil liquor, vinegar and spices together and when hot, throw in the oysters and let them remain in it.
This is a keeping recipe — a shellfish preserve meant to sit in its spiced vinegar for days or weeks without refrigeration — and that is precisely why it cannot be followed today. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a corrected method.
- The oysters are never properly cookedThe oysters are only briefly cooked -- "Boil up sufficient to plump them" specifies no time at all, and may be a matter of seconds in barely enough water to cover; the oysters are then lifted out onto a board and covered with a cloth. Nothing here guarantees that the interior reaches a temperature that reliably kills Vibrio parahaemolyticus or Vibrio vulnificus, both of which live in raw and lightly blanched shellfish.
- The acidity is unmeasured and probably too lowThe acidity is unmeasured and unknowable -- The pickle is one quart of vinegar "not too strong" to every pint of oyster liquor, which is a dilution of roughly two parts vinegar to one part near-neutral brine, and nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in strength. There is no way to know whether the finished liquor sits below the pH 4.6 needed to prevent the growth of Clostridium botulinum, and low-acid seafood held anaerobically is a classic botulism setting.
- No processing, no seal, no storage temperatureThe oysters are simply thrown into the hot liquor and left. There is no boiling-water or pressure process, no sterilised jar, no stated seal and no instruction to refrigerate. "For keeping" in this period meant a cool cellar, which is well inside the range in which spoilage and pathogenic organisms multiply.
- Salt as it is used here preserves nothingHalf a tablespoon of salt to a hundred oysters in the blanching water, and one tablespoon in the pickle, is seasoning rather than curing. Curing quantities are calculated as a percentage of the weight of flesh and brine; nothing in this recipe allows that calculation to be made.
- Oyster count is not a weight"A hundred oysters" and "every pint of the oyster liquor" are the only quantities given for the shellfish itself. Oysters range from under an ounce to several ounces of meat apiece, so the ratio of flesh to pickle in this recipe is genuinely indeterminate.
- Whole mace and whole clovesMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today mostly ground; the whole blades the recipe calls for turn up in spice shops and online rather than in supermarkets. Both spices here are essentially aromatic and cannot be relied on for preservation at these quantities.
- If you want pickled oystersUse a current recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern seafood cookbook, one that specifies vinegar strength, refrigeration and a short keeping time.
Pickled oysters were a staple of the American supper table through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap, enormously abundant along the Atlantic seaboard, and shipped inland by the barrel in ice — spiced vinegar was one of the few ways a household could hold a glut of them past a few days. Recipes of this kind belong to the world of the cold, help-yourself evening meal rather than to dinner, in company with pickled walnuts and spiced beef. The spicing here is unremarkable for the period: cloves, whole black pepper and mace recur often enough in vinegar pickles of fish and shellfish, and "vinegar, not too strong" reflects a time when households often made or bought vinegar of unknown and variable acidity. The collapse of the great oyster beds and the arrival of reliable refrigeration together made recipes like this one obsolete, and modern understanding of Vibrio and botulism has made it unrepeatable.