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Deviled Oysters
Wipe the oysters dry and lay in a flat dish, cover with a mixture of melted butter, cayenne pepper (or pepper sauce), and lemon juice. Let them lie in this for ten minutes, turning them frequently; take out, roll in cracker crumbs, then in beaten egg, then in crumbs, and fry in hot lard and butter, half and half.
A straightforward fried oyster with a peppered butter marinade standing in for the mustard usually implied by "deviled." Almost everything depends on the oysters being dry and the fat being hot.
- Dry the oysters properlyThis is the hinge. Shucked oysters carry a great deal of liquor, and any moisture left on them will steam under the crumbs and slide the coating off in the pan. Drain in a sieve, then blot between towels until the surface looks matte.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives no count. A pint of shucked oysters, roughly 20-24 medium, is a sensible batch and serves four as a first course with lemon.
- The butter marinadeTwo to three tablespoons melted butter, a good pinch of cayenne and the juice of half a lemon is enough for a pint. The recipe's ten minutes is worth treating as a maximum: the lemon juice will begin to firm the oysters, and longer soaking risks toughening them before they reach the pan.
- Pepper sauceBottled pepper sauces of this period were generally thin and vinegary, based on cayenne or bird peppers, closer to a Louisiana-style hot sauce than to a thick modern chili sauce. Use something of that type if substituting.
- The double crumb coatCrumbs, then egg, then crumbs looks backwards to anyone trained on flour-egg-crumb, but the first crumb layer does the job flour usually does: it dries the buttery surface so the egg has something to grip. It works; keep the order as written.
- Cracker crumbsSoda or water crackers crushed fine, not the sweet kind. They fry paler and crisper than breadcrumbs.
- Fat and temperatureHalf lard, half butter tastes right but the milk solids in butter scorch. Clarify the butter first, or accept a darker crust. The recipe says only 'hot'; in practice around 365-375F, about half an inch deep, works, and fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Cooking timeNinety seconds to two minutes, turning once, until the crumbs are gold. Oysters are cooked the moment their edges ruffle; anything beyond that and they shrink to rubber inside the crust.
"Deviled" in nineteenth-century American cookery meant nothing more precise than seasoned aggressively with something hot -- cayenne, mustard, pepper sauce -- and it was applied to ham, kidneys, crabs and eggs as readily as to oysters. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping appeared in 1877, by which time rail shipment and barrels of ice had made shucked oysters widely available well inland from either coast. The half-lard, half-butter frying fat is common in cookbooks of the period: lard for its cheapness and higher smoke point, butter for the flavor.