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Hangtown Fry
6 EGGS CREAM I PINT SMALL OYSTERS BUTTER SALT AND PEPPER Drain oysters well and slowly simmer in butter until edges begin to curl.
Break eggs in bowl and stir in some cream; pour over oysters and scramble everything lightly together, just as in making scrambled eggs.
Far Westerners use Olympia oysters, for which the State of Washington is famous, and these are no bigger than your thumbnail-100 of them wouldn't make a dozen ordinary oysters along the Atlantic.
This dish was popularized in Hangtown, a mining camp, where in boom days eggs were almost worth their weight in gold dust. (From America Cooks, by the Browns.)
A short list of ingredients with no quantities for the cream or butter, which is fine once you know the proportions. The whole dish takes under ten minutes.
- The hingeTake the oysters off the heat the moment their edges ruffle, usually a minute or two in foaming butter. Any longer and they tighten into rubber, and they will keep cooking once the eggs go in.
- Quantities not givenFor 6 eggs, about 3 tablespoons of cream and 2 tablespoons of butter is a workable ratio. A pint of shucked oysters is somewhere between about 16 and two dozen medium Eastern oysters depending on grade, or their liquor-packed equivalent from the fish counter.
- Olympia oystersOstrea lurida, the native Pacific oyster the Browns describe, is now a small specialty crop and expensive. Any small shucked oyster works; larger ones can be halved so they cook evenly with the eggs.
- Drain properlyOyster liquor will thin the eggs and make them weep. Drain in a sieve, then pat dry before they go in the butter. Save the liquor for a chowder rather than adding it here.
- Low heat, soft curdScramble over medium-low in the same pan, pulling the eggs into folds and stopping while they still look slightly underdone. Carryover heat finishes them.
- The baconThe editor's note mentions bacon, which the recipe itself omits. The San Francisco version is normally built on bacon fat with the cooked bacon folded in or laid alongside, and many versions dip the oysters in egg and cracker crumbs and fry them first.
- YieldServes 2 generously or 3 modestly, with toast. It does not hold or reheat.