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Oysters, Fritters Of
Open a dozen oysters, and simmer them for two minutes in their own liquor. Beard them, and put them aside. Beat two eggs, and mix with them half a table-spoonful of milk. Add a little salt, a quarter of a salt-spoonful of pepper, a quarter of a nutmeg, grated, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of grated lemon-rind. Dip the oysters into this batter, and then into finely-grated bread-crumbs. Fry in hot fat until they are brown and crisp, and use them for garnishing. Time, five or six minutes to fry the oysters. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per dozen.
A Victorian garnish rather than a dish in itself: a dozen oysters, egg-dipped, crumbed and fried to scatter round fish or a boiled fowl. Two of the original timings need attention.
- Fry fast, not five minutesCrumbed oysters brown in 60 to 90 seconds in fat at 350-375F. The stated five or six minutes will turn already-poached oysters to rubber; take them out when the crumbs are gold.
- The two-minute poach is rightThe two-minute poach is sound -- two minutes in their own liquor just firms them enough to hold the coating. Strain and keep the liquor for a sauce.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilled gill fringe round the edge. Pinch or snip it off after poaching; it is chewy and holds grit.
- A salt-spoonA salt-spoon is about a quarter of a modern teaspoon, so a quarter of one is a bare pinch of pepper. A quarter nutmeg, by contrast, is assertive for a dozen oysters -- a few rasps is nearer modern taste.
- The batter is an egg washTwo eggs with half a tablespoon of milk is a coating, not a batter. Pat the oysters dry and dust them with flour first, or the egg slides off and the crumbs will not hold.
- Bread-crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dried crumbs grated from stale bread, closer to fine dry crumbs than to panko. Sieve them so the coating is even.
- The fatThe recipe specifies only "hot fat"; lard or beef dripping would be the likely period choice, possibly clarified butter. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; the pan needs enough depth to float the oysters clear of the bottom.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield beyond the dozen oysters. As a garnish a dozen will spread over several plates; if serving them as a course in their own right, count six to eight oysters a head and multiply accordingly.
- The price line1s. 6d. to 3s. a dozen is the shilling-and-pence cost at the time of printing and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Cassell's recipe for fried oysters ends by directing that they be used as a garnish, which tells you how ordinary the oyster still was in late nineteenth-century Britain. Before the beds of the Thames estuary, Essex and the Solent were fished out, and before disease and pollution gradually eroded the trade, oysters were a bulking ingredient -- stirred into steak pudding, laid under a boiled fowl, or crumbed and set round a dish as a garnish. The technique itself is the standard English egg-and-crumb, the same one applied to cutlets and croquettes throughout the book, and the seasoning of nutmeg and lemon-rind may be read as a survival of the older English habit of spicing fish and shellfish rather than leaving them plain. The price note, quoted per dozen, was a genuine budgeting aid: cooks working from Cassell's were expected to weigh the cost of a garnish against what it added to the table.