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Fried Oysters
24 large oysters 1 t salt 1/2 t pepper ½ C bread or cracker crumbs 1 egg Clean and drain oysters. Roll in crumbs, season with salt and pepper, then dip in beaten egg, roll in crumbs again and fry in butter and lard.
A straightforward church-supper recipe that assumes you know what a properly shucked oyster looks like and how hot a skillet should be. The abbreviations are the ones used throughout the book: t is teaspoon, C is cup.
- The hinge: brief, hot fryingOysters need only long enough for the crust to brown, roughly 1 to 2 minutes a side in fat hot enough to sizzle on contact. Past that the oyster contracts and turns rubbery, and no amount of crumb coating disguises it.
- "Clean and drain"Shucked oysters should be picked over for shell fragments, then drained well and patted dry. Wet oysters will not hold the first coat of crumbs and will spit in the fat.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe double coating is deliberate — the first dry layer gives the egg something to grip. Season the crumbs rather than the oysters so the salt and pepper distribute through both coats.
- Bread or cracker crumbsCracker crumbs in this period usually meant crushed soda or oyster crackers, which tend to fry crisper and darker than fresh breadcrumbs. Either works.
- Butter and lardButter-and-lard mixtures are common in period frying recipes: lard tolerates the heat, butter supplies flavour and colour. About a quarter inch in a heavy skillet is enough. Butter alone is liable to scorch before the oysters brown.
- Oyster size"Large" probably points to one of the bigger shucked grades then sold rather than to a precise measurement. Very large oysters release more liquor mid-fry and can loosen their crust; small ones cook through almost instantly.
- YieldTwenty-four oysters serves four as a luncheon dish, or six as an appetiser. Fry in batches so the pan stays hot, and hold finished ones on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
Fried oysters turn up in a great many American community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their presence in a church book of this kind is a reminder of how far rail refrigeration had pushed shellfish inland. Barrelled and canned oysters travelled west from Baltimore and the Chesapeake in quantity through the second half of the nineteenth century, often cheap enough to be a common food rather than a luxury — the "oyster supper" was a standard fundraising event for churches and lodges across the Midwest, though prices varied widely by region. The crumb-egg-crumb coating and the butter-and-lard frying fat are both marks of the period: the technique is the same one applied to croquettes and cutlets throughout books like this one, and the fat blend reflects a kitchen where lard was the default and butter the flavouring.