Oysters, Pickled
INGREDIENTS. -100 oysters, to each 1/2 pint of vinegar, 1 blade of pounded mace, 1 strip of lemonpeel, 12 black peppercorns. Get the oysters in good condition, open them, place them in a saucepan, and let them simmer in their own liquor for about 10 minutes very gently; then take them out one by one, and place them in a jar, and cover them, when cold, with a pickle made as follows: - Measure the oysterliquor; add to it the same quantity of vinegar, with mace, lemon-peel and pepper in the above proportion, and boil it for 5 minutes; when cold, pour over the oysters and tie them down very closely, as contact with the air spoils them.
SEASONABLE from September to April.
Note. Put this pickle away in small jars; because, directly one is opened, its contents should immediately be eaten, as they soon spoil.
The pickle should not be kept more than 2 or 3 months.
OYSTERS, SAUSAGES OF.
This is a shelf-stable seafood preserve made without any measured acidity, sterilisation or refrigeration, and it cannot be reproduced safely. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The acid is unmeasured and dilutedThe pickle is oyster liquor cut one-to-one with vinegar of unstated strength. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely, and halving it with a near-neutral, protein-rich shellfish liquor puts the final pH in no reliable place. Safe pickled seafood depends on a known, verified acidity, which this method has no way of achieving.
- Clostridium botulinumLow-acid seafood, sealed "very closely" against air and held at room temperature for two or three months, is the textbook condition for botulinum toxin production. The airtight covering Mrs Beeton recommends for keeping the oysters from spoiling is precisely what favours an anaerobic organism.
- Vibrio and the ten-minute simmerA gentle simmer in their own liquor is not a controlled process time at a verified temperature. Ten minutes of simmering would in practice deal with Vibrio parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus, the organisms specifically associated with oysters, but the recipe gives no temperature, no confirmation of doneness and no cooling schedule before the cold pickle goes on, so nothing about the step is verifiable.
- Cooling and holdingThe oysters are cooled to room temperature, then covered with a separately cooled liquid, then stored on a larder shelf. Every step sits in the range where surviving spores germinate. The book's own warning that the contents "soon spoil" once opened is a fair indication of how marginal the preserve was even then.
- "Tie them down very closely"The recipe does not say what the cover was; in this period it would most likely have been a bladder, parchment or cloth tied at the neck rather than a modern sealed jar, and no such closure was sterile. Repeating the technique in a screw-top jar makes the anaerobic problem worse, not better.
- If you want pickled oystersUse a current, tested recipe from a food-safety authority, one that specifies vinegar strength, final acidity and refrigerated storage with a short shelf life.
- Reading the originalFor context only: the half pint is an imperial half pint, about 10 fluid ounces; a blade of mace is a single piece of the dried aril that sheathes a nutmeg, not the whole casing; and quantities of 100 oysters reflect a period when oysters were still bought in bulk and were cheaper than they later became.
Pickled oysters were a staple of British and American larders through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when oysters were dredged in enormous quantities from the Thames estuary, the Essex and Kent beds, and later the Chesapeake, and sold by the barrel to working households. Preserving them in spiced vinegar was the practical answer to a glut and to the lack of any means of keeping shellfish beyond a day or two: the season Mrs Beeton gives, September to April, is the traditional oyster season, avoiding the summer spawning months when the flesh is thin and spoilage fastest. Pickled oysters travelled well and turned up in ships' provisions, taverns and picnic hampers. The practice faded for several reasons: the great beds were fished out and polluted in the later nineteenth century, and ice, canning and eventually refrigeration made the vinegar jar less necessary.