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Pennsylvania-Dutch Oyster Powder
(For making sauce or flavoring fish where oysters aren't to be had) Pound oysters with 2 ounces salt for each dozen. Press through hair sieve, add equal amount flour, and pound to stiff dough. Roll out to thickness of a coin and cut in 1/2inch squares, dry slowly in oven, turning every 30 minutes until they crumble (about 4 hours). Sift to powder, bottle, and cork tightly for use. For making into sauce use 3 times as much milk as the amount of oyster powder, and 1/2 as much butter.
This is a shelf-stable preserve made from raw shellfish, and it cannot be reproduced safely in a home kitchen. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a corrected method.
- Raw shellfish, never brought to temperatureThe oysters are pounded raw and dried in a "slow" oven with no temperature given and no point at which the interior of the dough reaches a safe heat. Vibrio parahaemolyticus and V. vulnificus, along with norovirus, survive gentle drying; a four-hour low-oven bake that only ends when squares crumble gives no assurance of lethality.
- Preserved with no measured controlPreservation here rests entirely on salt and dryness, and neither is specified in a way that can be checked. The salt is given per dozen oysters, which vary enormously in weight, and "until they crumble" is not a moisture measurement. A cured, bottled, corked shellfish product with no water-activity or temperature target is outside what can be recommended.
- Raw flour in a stored productAn equal amount of flour is worked in (the recipe does not say whether by weight or volume) and is never brought to a cooking temperature during the slow drying. Flour is a recognised carrier of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Salmonella, and the brief sauce-making step at the end is not framed as a full cook.
- If you want the flavourCommercially produced dried oyster and dried shrimp powders, and bottled oyster sauce, are made under controlled drying and are widely sold. Use a current recipe for any home-preserved seafood.
- Vessels and measures in the textA hair sieve is a fine-mesh sieve, traditionally woven of horsehair; "the thickness of a coin" gives no exact measure, but implies something on the order of a sixteenth of an inch. The closing sauce ratio, three parts milk to one part powder with half as much butter, does not say whether the parts are by weight or volume, and the original gives no yield.
Oyster powders and "oyster essences" appear across English and American household books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all answering the same problem this entry states outright: how to get oyster flavour where oysters cannot be had. Before rail and refrigeration, fresh oysters carried inland only as far as they could be moved quickly, and preserved forms -- pickled oysters in kegs, dried oysters, and concentrated powders -- were the alternative. The attribution to Pennsylvania Dutch practice is traditional rather than documented; the method itself, pound with salt, bind with flour, dry and sift, is common to a whole family of period flavouring powders, including mushroom and lemon-peel powders made the same way.