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Oyster Fritters
Drain off liquor, boil, skim, and to a cupful add a cup of milk, two or three eggs, salt and pepper, and flour enough to make a rather thick batter. Have hot lard or beef drippings ready in a kettle, drop the batter into it with a large spoon, taking up one oyster for each spoonful. The oyster must be large and plump.
A straightforward fritter batter thinned with the oysters' own liquor. The vagueness is in the flour and the frying, both of which are easy to pin down.
- The liquor firstDrain the oysters, bring the liquor to a boil and skim off the scum that rises. Measure a cup of the skimmed liquor after boiling, not before.
- Batter consistency"Flour enough to make a rather thick batter" works out to roughly 1½ to 2 cups for the cup of liquor, cup of milk and eggs. It should mound on the spoon and fall slowly, not pour.
- No leavening givenThe recipe gives no leavening at all; the eggs are the only lift. Some period fritter recipes add a teaspoon of baking powder for a lighter result, but this one as printed does not call for it.
- Fat and temperatureDeep-fry at 365–375F; the recipe gives no temperature. Beef drippings are offered here alongside lard and give a good crust; any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job. Too cool and the fritter soaks fat, too hot and the oyster inside is still cold.
- One oyster per spoonfulThis is the hinge. The batter is a jacket, not a bulk ingredient — scoop a spoonful of batter that carries a single oyster, so the shellfish cooks through in the two or three minutes the crust needs to brown.
- Oyster size"Large and plump" points to the bigger grades of shucked oyster. Small ones vanish in the batter and overcook before the outside colours.
- YieldA cup of liquor, a cup of milk and three eggs makes enough batter for roughly two to three dozen fritters, serving four to six. Drain on paper and serve at once with lemon or a vinegar-based sauce.
Oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why a book compiled by Ohio housewives in 1877 treats shellfish at length without apology. Buckeye Cookery treats them as an everyday protein: fried, scalloped, stewed, made into patties and, here, battered. The fritter itself is an old English and American way of stretching a small quantity of anything expensive with milk, egg and flour, and the trick of boiling and skimming the oyster liquor to flavour the batter shows the period's habit of wasting nothing from the shucking bowl. Wild Atlantic oyster beds were heavily overfished by the end of the century.