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Sauted Oysters
Put 1 pint oysters in strainer over a bowl and over them pour 2 tablespoons cold water, reserving liquid. Pick over oysters, removing any bits of shell that may adhere to tough muscle. Crush 5 common crackers on board with rolling pin or put through food chopper, and sift the Crumbs. There should be 1/2 cup. Coat each oyster with the cracker crumbs. Saute in 4 tablespoons melted butter or cooking oil. When brown on one side turn and brown the other side. Cover 8 slices of toast, cut in three strips each, with Celery sauce, and serve an oyster on each piece of toast.
A straightforward crumb-coated saute that stands or falls on two things: dry oysters and a hot pan. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: get the oysters dryThe 2 tablespoons of cold water are a rinse to float off grit, not a soak. Drain well and blot each oyster on a towel before crumbing, or the coating slides off in the fat and you get a pan of loose crumbs.
- Common crackersA New England common cracker was a hard, plain, barely salted round, thicker and larger than a modern saltine, so five of them plausibly give the half cup the recipe expects. Unsalted saltines or plain water crackers are the closest supermarket match, but they are smaller and lighter, so measure the crumbs rather than counting crackers. Sifting removes the coarse shards that scorch.
- A pint of oystersThat is a pint by volume of shucked oysters, sold in tubs at any fish counter; count varies with size, roughly 16 to 24 medium ones. Smaller oysters suit this best; very large ones weep and steam rather than brown.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none, and it matters. One to two minutes a side over medium-high heat, until the crumbs are gold and the edges of the oyster have just curled. Beyond that they tighten and turn rubbery.
- The fatFour tablespoons of butter in a hot pan will brown past the point you want before the second batch is done. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, holds up; work in batches and wipe out burnt crumbs between them.
- Celery sauceAssumed known in this book: a plain white sauce (butter, flour, milk) simmered with chopped celery or celery stock and strained. The reserved oyster liquor, strained through a cloth, can replace part of the milk, though the recipe never says what the reserved liquid is for.
- Yield and assemblyEight slices of toast cut in three gives 24 strips, so match the number of oysters to the number of strips rather than the other way round. Served as written it feeds four at lunch, or eight as a first course. Sauce the toast at the last minute, or it goes soft under the oyster.
Sauteed oysters on toast belong to the long American period when oysters were cheap, abundant and eaten several times a week — the beds of Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound supplied the whole eastern seaboard, and shucked oysters travelled inland by rail in sealed cans and buckets. A menu book "for luncheon and supper guests" is aiming squarely at the middle-class hostess who needed something warm, quick and slightly formal for the meals that were not dinner, and oysters filled that slot for decades: creamed, scalloped, in patties, in soup, or crumbed and fried like this. Cracker crumbs were a widespread American coating for fried oysters in this period, and the common cracker the recipe calls for was a pantry staple, kept in a barrel and crushed as needed for coatings, stuffings and thickening. Celery sauce, now largely forgotten, was a standard white sauce variation in this era, when celery was still a somewhat luxurious winter vegetable, said to have been sometimes served in tall glass vases on the table.