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Oysters, Pickled
Put in a saucepan the oysters which are to be pickled, together with their own liquor, and let them boil gently for ten or twelve minutes. Lift them out, put them into small jars, and cover them. Let the liquid settle, then pour off the clear part, measure it, and put it on to boil, with the same quantity of good vinegar, two blades of mace, a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and the thin rind of half a small lemon with each pint of vinegar. Boil this pickle for ten minutes, then take it off, and when cold pour it over the oysters, and tie them down carefully, or they will spoil. Pickled oysters will not keep more than a few weeks, and they should be put into small jars, so that the contents of one may be speedily finished after being exposed to the air. They should be served in a small dish, with a little of the pickle strained over them, and a little finely-minced parsley sprinkled on the top. Brown bread and butter may be eaten with them. Probable cost, oysters, 1s. 6d. per dozen.
This is a home-preserved seafood recipe with no measured acidity, no processing temperature and an intended shelf life of several weeks. It cannot be reproduced safely, and the points below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- The acidity is unknown and unmeasurableThe pickle is one part strained oyster liquor to one part vinegar, so the finished acidity depends entirely on how much salty, protein-rich liquor the oysters gave up. Safe pickling of a low-acid food requires the finished product to sit at pH 4.6 or below, and nothing in this method guarantees that.
- Botulism, specificallyOysters are a low-acid food, and Clostridium botulinum spores survive the gentle ten-minute boil described here. Covered, held at room temperature for weeks and insufficiently acidified, oysters submerged under liquid can readily reach the oxygen-free conditions the organism needs. The toxin gives no reliable warning by smell, appearance or taste.
- "Tie them down carefully, or they will spoil"A cloth, paper or bladder cover tied over the mouth was a common closure of the period. It is not a vacuum seal, nothing was heat-processed after filling, and the pickle is added cold to already-cooked oysters, which reintroduces handling contamination at the last step.
- The cooking time is also wrong on its own termsTen to twelve minutes at a boil turns oysters to rubber. Even in dishes where oysters are cooked, two minutes or the moment the edges curl is the limit.
- What to make insteadPickled and soused oysters are still made, but only to a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength and refrigerated storage measured in days. Use one of those.
- Reading the cost line"1s. 6d. per dozen" is eighteen pence for twelve oysters. Two blades of mace means two pieces of the lacy aril around the nutmeg, not ground mace, and it was a standard pickling spice alongside the peppercorns and lemon rind.
Pickled oysters belong to the long stretch of British and American cookery when oysters were a far more everyday shellfish than they later became. Barrelled and pickled oysters travelled inland from the Thames estuary, the Essex and Kentish beds, and later from Chesapeake Bay, and they turn up throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books alongside potted and scalloped versions of the same shellfish. The mace, peppercorn and lemon-rind pickle here is the standard English formula of the period, close to what was used for salmon and mackerel. The source, which appears to be Cassell's, is candid about the limits of the method, warning that the jars must be small and finished quickly, which is a fair admission that the keeping quality was marginal even by contemporary standards. The oyster beds that made the dish ordinary were largely fished out and diseased by the early twentieth century, and the recipe went with them.