Panned Oysters
Melt two tablespoons of butter in hot frying pan, add one pint of cleaned and drained oysters, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook in hot oven until edges shrivel. Serve on hot buttered squares of toast with strained liquor from oysters. Garnish with finely chopped parsley.
Sautéd Oysters Pick over, drain, and dry oysters; dip in crumbs, egg and crumb, season with salt and pepper. Melt one tablespoon each of lard and butter in frying pan. When hissing hot, cover bottom of pan with prepared oysters and sauté until a golden brown on both sides. Drain on brown paper; reheat in oven if necessary. Serve on hot platter and garnish with parsley, lemon and sauce tartare.
Two short methods for shucked oysters, both of which live or die by timing. The book assumes a heavy iron pan, a very hot oven, and oysters bought loose in their own liquor.
- The hinge: watch the edges, not the clockOysters are done the moment the ruffled edges curl and firm, which in a hot oven is a matter of a few minutes. Beyond that the muscle tightens and turns rubbery, and no sauce will bring it back.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures, and the term is conventionally read as a very hot oven, somewhere around 450F. Preheat the pan on the stovetop so the butter is already foaming when the oysters go in, otherwise they steam in their own liquor instead of panning.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is roughly 20 to 25 medium oysters, about a pound of meat, and serves three or four on toast.
- Draining and dryingBoth recipes insist on it, and it matters. Save the drained liquor for the panned version, strain it through a fine sieve or cloth to catch shell fragments, and pat the oysters genuinely dry before breading or the coating slides off.
- "Egg and crumb"This is the standard three-stage breading of the period: crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again. "Dip in crumbs, egg and crumb" is shorthand, not a typo.
- Lard and brown paperEqual parts lard and butter give a higher smoke point than butter alone; a neutral oil does the same job. Drain the sautéd oysters on paper towels or a rack rather than grocery-bag paper, which is often recycled stock and not intended for food contact.
- Sauce tartareIn this period it is mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, onion and parsley, thinned slightly with vinegar. Any modern tartar sauce stands in.
- ReheatingThe instruction to "reheat in oven if necessary" presumably covers a batch held while the rest fry. Keep it brief and hot, for the same reason as above.
Panning was the plainest of the many ways American cooks handled the shucked oysters that arrived by barrel and, later, by refrigerated railcar from Chesapeake and Long Island beds: butter, high heat, toast, and nothing else. Its presence in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook is a reminder of what these books actually were. The Walter M. Lowney Company published a full general cookery volume in the early twentieth century, with the confectionery chapters as the commercial point and the rest supplied so the book would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. The pairing here is also instructive about period economics: oysters were cheap enough to be an everyday supper dish, served on toast, well into the 1900s, before overharvesting and pollution turned them into a luxury.