Fried Oysters
Select large oysters; drain them and dry between soft towels. Dip each oyster in beaten egg until it is thoroughly coated; then roll in cracker dust or fine bread crumbs well seasoned with salt and pepper. Lay the oysters in a wire basket, a few at a time, and lower them into boiling hot fat. Test the fat by lowering a piece of stale bread into it; if it browns in thirty seconds the fat is sufficiently hot; if it burns the fat is too hot. Fry the oysters a delicate brown; drain them over the fat; then lay on brown paper in the oven until serving time.
Olive oil is best for frying, though suetine, cottolene, crisco, or a mixture of suet and lard brings good results. Butter alone or lard alone should never be used. 40 large oysters 2 hard-boiled eggs Salt and pepper Little grated nutmeg
A straightforward deep-fry that depends almost entirely on two things: dry oysters and fat at the right temperature. The ingredient list at the foot of the page does not quite match the method, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- Dry the oysters properlyThis is the hinge. Shucked oysters carry a great deal of liquor, and any moisture left on the surface will loosen the coating and make the fat spit. Drain them well, then blot between towels until the surface is tacky rather than wet.
- The bread test in numbersA cube of stale bread browning in thirty seconds indicates fat somewhere around 375F or a little above; the test is only approximate. Below that the crumbs soak up fat; above it they colour before the oyster has heated through.
- Frying timeThe recipe gives none. Large oysters need about 1 to 2 minutes at that temperature — pull them the moment the crust is a delicate gold. Held longer they tighten and turn rubbery, and the liquor inside bursts the coating.
- Cracker dustPlain soda crackers or saltines crushed fine. They give a lighter, sandier crust than dried breadcrumbs and brown more quickly, so watch the colour.
- The vanished fatsSuetine and Cottolene were branded shortenings of the period, Cottolene a cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet product; both are long gone. Crisco still exists but has been reformulated. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Olive oil is recommended here as best, but a modern extra-virgin has a lower smoke point than a refined oil and may smoke at frying temperature.
- The mismatched ingredient listThe method calls for beaten egg, while the list specifies two hard-boiled eggs (and a grated nutmeg the method never uses). The text does not reconcile them. Use beaten raw egg for the coating.
- Holding in the ovenBrown paper stands in for a wire rack. A rack set over a sheet pan in a 200F oven does the job better, since paper traps steam underneath and softens the crust.
- YieldForty large oysters serves six generously as a main course, or eight as a first course.
Fried oysters belong to the era when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury — American beds along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were still yielding enormous harvests when this book was compiled, and oysters travelled inland by rail in barrels and cans. What dates the recipe most precisely is the paragraph on fat: the flat instruction that butter or lard alone should never be used, and the roll-call of Suetine, Cottolene and Crisco, places it squarely in the first decades of the twentieth century, when hydrogenated and cottonseed-oil shortenings were new, heavily advertised, and being pressed on cooks as cleaner and more reliable than animal fat. Crisco was introduced in 1911; Cottolene, a cottonseed-and-beef-suet product, was older and by then a household name.