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Fried Oysters (Drain the oysters through)
Drain the oysters through a sieve. Beat up two or three eggs. Have ready some grated bread crumbs. Sprinkle some salt and a little pepper over the oysters; then dip each oyster into the egg and bread crumbs. Have the pan hot and clean; put equal portions of butter and lard into the pan. Be careful to keep the fat of oysters from burning.--Mrs. R.
To Fry Oysters.
Wash them and dry them on a clean napkin ; dip in beaten egg and pounded crackers sifted, and let them lie several hours before frying, and they will not shrink.--Mrs. P.
To Fry Oysters.
Drain the oysters dry. Three eggs beaten, and grated crackers. Dip the oyster first in the egg and then in the crackers; do this twice. Grease the pan with butter or lard. Add pepper and salt to taste, and fry.--Mrs. P.W. Clam or Oyster Fritters.
Chop up the clam very fine (when of oysters, leave them whole) ; put them in a batter and fry them.--Mrs. D.
Four contributors' versions of the same operation, given in the shorthand of cooks who assumed a barrel of oysters in the pantry. The variables worth controlling are dryness, crumb, and how briefly the oysters stay in the fat.
- The hinge: dry oysters, hot fat, short cookingA wet oyster steams its coating loose and floods the pan. Drain in a sieve, then blot on towels until the surface is tacky rather than slick. In fat at 360-375F they need 1 to 2 minutes a side, until the crumbs are gold and the oysters have plumped and firmed; longer and they tighten into erasers and weep liquor into the pan.
- Do not let breaded oysters stand for hoursMrs. P. says to let them lie several hours before frying so they will not shrink; she does not say where they were kept. Raw shellfish held at room temperature is exactly the condition Vibrio and other bacteria favour. If you want the coating to set, refrigerate the breaded oysters, uncovered on a rack, for 30 to 60 minutes.
- "Pounded crackers sifted" and "grated crackers"These mean plain unsalted soda or water crackers crushed and sieved to an even crumb, close to modern cracker meal. Cracker crumb browns faster and stays crisper than grated fresh bread, which is why two of these four cooks use it, a third uses bread crumbs, and the fourth batters instead.
- Double dippingMrs. P.W.'s instruction to dip twice in egg and crumbs is the sound one for oysters, which shed coating easily. Season the crumb rather than the oyster so the salt does not draw out moisture while the batches wait.
- Butter and lard in equal portionsThe lard raises the smoke point and the butter supplies flavour and colour. Clarified butter with a neutral oil, or lard alone, does the same work. Use enough to come a third of the way up the oysters; this is shallow frying, not deep.
- "Keep the fat of oysters from burning"What scorches is the oyster liquor and stray crumb that collects in the pan and turns bitter. Fry in small batches, wipe the pan and add fresh fat every batch or two, and keep the heat steady rather than climbing.
- The fritters need a batter you supplyMrs. D. gives no proportions at all. Any standard fritter batter works: roughly 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, salt, 1 egg and about 3/4 cup milk, thick enough to coat a spoon, with the oysters folded in whole and dropped by spoonfuls into 365F fat.
- YieldA pint of shucked oysters, 25 to 30 select-size, feeds three or four as a course with lemon and a vinegar-pepper sauce. Two or three eggs is generous for a pint; beat them with a spoonful of water or oyster liquor to stretch the coating.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited to some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states, prints recipes the way they were passed between households: several versions of the same dish, each initialled, with no attempt to reconcile them. That four cooks sent in fried oysters says something about supply. Chesapeake oysters were the cheap protein of the eastern seaboard in the nineteenth century, shipped inland by rail in barrels and kegs and sold shucked by the quart, so a Virginia kitchen fried them the way a later one fried potatoes. The taste for a cracker-crumb crust rather than bread crumbs is a distinctly American habit, tied to the ubiquity of hard soda and water crackers in the period pantry; the two techniques here, crumbed and battered as fritters, are still the two ways oysters are fried along the same coast.