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Fried Oysters (Drain carefully remove all)
Drain carefully, remove all bits of shell, and sprinkle with pepper and salt, and set in a cool place for ten or fifteen minutes. Then, f oysters are small, pour them into a pan of crackers rolled fine, add the liquor, mix well, and let stand five minutes, add a little salt and pepper, mold into small cakes with two or three oysters in each, roll in dry crackers until well encrusted, and fry in hot lard and butter, or beef-drippings. Serve hot in a covered dish. Or, dip the oysters in the yolk of eggs, well seasoned and beaten, then in corn meal with a little baking powder mixed with it, and fry in hot lard like doughnuts; or if you have frying basket, place them on that and drop it in the hot lard. Test the heat as for doughnuts.
Or, drain thoroughly, put in a hot frying-pan, turn so as to brown on both sides. They cook in this way in a few moments, and the peculiar flavor of the oysters is well preserved. Serve on a hot covered dish, with butter, pepper and salt, or add a little cream just before serving, and serve on toast; or take two parts rolled crackers and one part corn meal, mix well, roll the oysters in it, and fry in equal parts butter and lard. Season with salt and pepper.-Mrs. W. W. Woods.
Five methods in one paragraph, all of them built on the same principle: the oyster wants heat for as short a time as possible. Read it as a menu of options rather than a sequence.
- The hinge: keep the frying briefShucked oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle and the coating colors, roughly 60 to 90 seconds in deep fat or a minute a side in a pan. Held longer they tighten into rubber and weep their liquor into the breading.
- "Crackers rolled fine"Plain soda or water crackers crushed to coarse sand, not modern salted snack crackers. Panko or dry breadcrumbs can stand in, though crackers tend to brown a shade darker.
- "The liquor"The oysters' own strained juice from the container or the shell. It moistens the cracker crumbs into a binder for the small cakes; a tablespoon or two is enough, and too much makes a paste that will not hold shape.
- "Test the heat as for doughnuts"The book gives no temperature; the period test was to drop in a cube of bread and see it brown in about a minute, which corresponds to roughly 365 to 375F. Cooler than that and the coating soaks fat; much hotter and the crumbs scorch before the oyster heats through.
- FatsLard, beef drippings, or a lard-and-butter mixture. Butter alone will burn at frying temperature, and in this recipe it is never used for frying without lard; a neutral high-smoke-point oil works for the deep-fried versions.
- The dry-pan methodOysters drained and browned in a bare hot pan; the recipe itself says 'the peculiar flavor of the oysters is well preserved.' The pan must be genuinely hot and the oysters patted dry, or they will steam in their own liquid instead of coloring.
- Baking powder in the cornmealThe recipe calls for 'a little' mixed into the meal. It lightens the crust slightly and does nothing for flavor.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A pint of shucked oysters will serve three or four as a course; molded two or three to a cake it makes a dozen or more of the small cakes, depending on how small the oysters are.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in 1877, a long way from tidewater, and the fact that its shell-fish chapter runs to several pages of oyster cookery says a good deal about the railroads. Barrels of iced Chesapeake oysters moved inland through the 1860s and 70s, and oysters turned from a coastal food into a national one, cheap enough to be a weeknight supper and fashionable enough to open a dinner. The economies here are inland economies: small oysters bound with cracker crumbs into cakes, and cornmeal alongside the crackers. Community cookbooks of this kind gathered recipes over the signature of the contributor, and Mrs. W. W. Woods has plainly written down everything she knows about frying an oyster in a single breath rather than sorting it into separate recipes.